One of our local industry is citrus fruits production. In our university, we have food and natural products technology centers that process these citrus fruits into wines, jam, and soap among others. In this regards, we can use also these procedures to teach science concepts like fermentation/anearobic respiration, anti-bacterial agents, and saponification processes. While we are integrating these procedures in our science teaching, we can promote our own local industry.
In your country or locality, what are the effects of local industry integration in education?
There are plenty of benefits.
Integrating with industry and outer community can help promoting skills of communication, creativity.
It can be combined with teaching subjects as well, e.g. commerce with mathematics, agriculture with science, artistic with arts etc.
Local industry can be a good supplement to the school functions, e.g. integrating things that are not involved in curriculum into school teaching (informal education).
However, as always, it comes down to effective planning and management.
One of the biggest problems of education is the lack of real world knowledge. Congratulations on your university's effort to bridge this gap between basic education and real world practice. I am not aware specifically of this practice in basic education, however, I've observed that in most grad schools it is up to the student (generally masters or PhD) to go out of their way to contact industries and learn from them. In my work, I used to always talk to people from industry, understand their problems and then work backwards to define an academic research question.
In my local area (East Yorkshire, England), there is a college offering degree courses in agriculture, animal management, etc.; the college is situated in a suitably rural area, to enable and facilitate the study of such subjects. Also, in a local university, the students are working with data from the bat box surveys carried out by the local bat group (good joint working from both sides, although not reflecting a local industry!) The bat boxes are in local woods, and this would not be carried out with such ease by a university where the countryside was not as easily accessed. This maybe reflects what was written by the author of this interesting question, Rodney Cajimat.
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