Revisioning Co-op Work Reports in Economics at UW

Co-op education is a distinguishing component of studying at the University of Waterloo.  Ideally, co-op work experience would promote student reflection on the distance between academic training in economics and experience in private, non-profit or public employment, and thereby yield greater understanding of economies.  This is a challenging objective to fulfill.  Promoting such learning introduces some thorny problems to do with the difference between direct social experience and social investigation based on objective meaning-contexts (to use the language of A. Schutz).  Students need to be able to step back from the abstractions of their studies, and attend to the definitions, concerns, and activities of their co-workers.

To encourage such reflection among Economics students, a new work-report process is being introduced in the Spring of 2019.  It will involve more orientation materials and a proposal to precede the end-of-work term report.

Early assistance in developing a process was provided to me by the CTE’s Waterloo Assessment Institute, April 11-12, 2019.  More recently, books by and correspondence with Robert Prus have deepened my own reflection on the possibilities of studying group life.