October 1998 Conference Connects Schools and Workplaces
Exploring the power of linkages between education, technology, community partners, and workforce development, Work Now and in the Future—the annual school-to-work conference series hosted by the Laboratory’s Education and Work Program—will be held November 8-10 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland.
This year marks the 15th anniversary of the conference, which attracts a national audience of more than 3,000 people. Participants can choose from over 150 integrated sessions, clustered into six major strands to reflect the various facets of school-to-work. This year’s conference strands include: community connections, school-to-career innovations, contextual learning, systems change, emerging technologies, and workforce development.
Conference sessions will explore such topics as:
- Business/education partnerships
- Connecting classrooms to communities
- Welfare reform
- One-stop career centers
- Project-based learning
- Tech Prep
- Serving all students
- Models of systems change
- Rural and urban education
Included in the nationally recognized roster of speakers are:
Ira Magaziner, Senior Policy Advisor to the President; Kay Toliver, teacher and star of the award-winning classroom television series The Eddie Files; Rick Smolan, multimedia publisher and creator of the best-selling "A Day in the Life" photography book series;
JD Hoye, former Director of the National School-to-Work Office; Adria Steinberg, Program Director at Jobs for the Future; and many other innovators in the fields of business and education.
To highlight the types of skills students will need in the workplaces of tomorrow, the conference will also feature "night owl" tours of area workplaces, including high technology, manufacturing, and health-care facilities. "Study tours" of elementary, middle, or high schools in the Portland area will illustrate what innovative school reform efforts look like in practice. And Parent Night, a popular feature of past conferences, will be repeated this year to give parents and children an opportunity to find out what kinds of choices are available to high school graduates and what they can do to prepare for them. A full day of intensive preconference sessions will also be held November 8 to allow interested participants to explore one of 12 conference topics more comprehensively.
A new feature of this year’s conference is the Action Learning Series, a structured sequence of learning activities designed to guide teams in developing action plans for implementation. This interactive, daylong series will be held November 9, and participants can choose to attend sessions on two topics: building strategic alliances or building integrated classroom learning systems.
This year, for the first time, the Northwest Center for Emerging Technologies at Bellevue Community College in Washington has partnered with the Laboratory by incorporating Edu.Tech@Work, the center’s annual Information Technology conference, into the Work Now Conference strand on emerging technology.
Detailed registration flyers with conference fees and hotel and airline information were mailed early in September, and up-to-date information on specific conference sessions is available on the Internet at http://www.nwrel.org/edwork/wnf15. The Web site also contains instructions for registering online. For more information, call Haiden Floyd at (503) 275-9632 or e-mail wnf@nwrel.org.
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Date of Last Update: 9/28/01
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