Eleven years ago, Utica Community Schools sent a group of educators to visit the Academies of Nashville, a high school model partnered with Ford Next Generation Learning to provide career-focused academies. When teacher, Mark LaCombe, got off the bus immediately following a tour of one of the Nashville schools, he excitedly asked Associate Principal, Alison Hildebrand, “When are we doing this?!”
Now, eight years into their work at the Stevenson Center for Manufacturing, Automation and Design Engineering, known simply as Stevenson MADE, they are far exceeding their initial thoughts about what this could be.
Along with being one of the Associate Principals at Stevenson High School, Alison Hildebrand is also the Academy Administrator for Stevenson MADE, and there is nowhere she would rather be. She is proud of the MADE culture of professionalism that they are instilling in their students. The MADE students are encouraged to be professional in all they do, even in the smallest things, like saying “hello.” As a result, MADE students are very good at talking to adults, and the way that they carry themselves stands out.
All eighth graders in Utica are able to choose whether they want to participate in the Stevenson MADE program. Each year, 90-100 students enter the program, which includes about 350 students in grades 9-12. In the first year of the program, freshmen have all four core classes and a design thinking elective with MADE teachers.
These teachers promote engineering type thinking through curriculum integration and project-based learning. A study of Romeo and Juliet may include building scenes out of Legos and a study of World War II may integrate social studies and English as students research and write about the most effective weapons that were used. After this freshman foundation, sophomores have the opportunity to explore all three of the MADE pathways, picking their major by fourth quarter of their sophomore year. The three pathways are Design Engineering, which includes CAM and 3D printing; Fabrication, which includes CNC machining, welding and assembly; and Automation, which includes robotics, electrical and system design. In eleventh grade MADE students take a one-hour class in their major, followed in twelfth grade by a two-hour block and a capstone project.
All of this fits within the regular Stevenson High School schedule, but some scheduling flexibility exists for MADE teachers to provide extended time for projects. While Alison acknowledges that this is her dream job, it is not without its challenges. The biggest challenge that she and the MADE team have had to figure out is how to best integrate their business partners, how to use them correctly, so they are not just describing their job, but instead are giving students real problems to solve.
These business partnerships, these exciting career-based pathways, these integrated, hands-on projects, this culture of professionalism, have all lead to some impressive results, including what Alison calls her greatest day. That was the first day she got to go to the GM Tech Center and watch three of her seniors present to GM designers and executives their thoughts on the redesign of the center console of a Hummer. They were presenting to the very designers who did the designing in the first place, and they were fielding questions and sharing research.
“I got chills,” she said. “This is the pinnacle.” This is why we innovate.