Site Supervisor Conference

I was able to meet only briefly with my site supervisor, but we followed up our discussion with several emails.

The crux of our initial discussion was the issue of the three subjects I've decided to focus on during my project:  Auto Mechanics, Ag Mechanics and Health Sciences.

While Auto Mechanics and Ag Mechanics will be easy to portray in posters and other media, the Health Sciences piece will be more difficult because those students go out to other sites, which are inaccessible to the Commercial Photography students who are gathering the images. Additionally, Health Sciences students don't even go out to other sites until January, which would not be conducive to my timeline.

In addition to that concern, the Health Science teacher is of the opinion that the issue of the gender gap in Health Sciences is not caused by student perception, but by administrator and counselor word usage.  It is her opinion that Health Science is continually referred to as "nursing" instead of Health Science, so is slanted toward the female gender for that reason.  This issue (of adult perception and changing terminology) would not fit the scope of my research.

My site supervisor was convinced, however, that Health Science was not listed by TEA as one of the nontraditional classes, and that instead, I should focus on the CNA (Certified Nursing Assistant) program, which is.  While this would allow me to focus on the gender in media issue, the audience would be narrowed to sophomores and juniors, since there are several prerequisites to get into the CNA program.  The audience for Ag and Auto Mechanics classes would include all high school students.

My site supervisor also brought up the issue of classroom climate as part of the retention aspect of gender in nontraditional classes.  While the scope of this issue is outside the boundaries of my project, I did assure her that I would address additional avenues during my presentation and recommend studies I thought would further benefit the program.

This was the limit of our face-to-face conversation.  Afterwards, I referred back to the information from TEA and did find that Health Science is a nontraditional course, which brings back into focus my concern about the recruiting issue being outside the scope of my study.  In subsequent emails, my site supervisor and I decided that I would choose another area of Career and Technology classes to replace Health Sciences. 

Another item of concern was the type of media I would use in the campaign and the distribution of that media.  We agreed on using posters, flyers, videos and a digital brochure, and my site supervisor promised to investigate how to distribute the digital brochure in order to ensure parents received it.