Welcome back to the Connect FCS Ed podcast! Today, we are continuing our series on FCC LA. How in the world do we incorporate it into our classrooms? And with me, I have Christine Hollings worth, who is the national FCC LA staff member when it comes to senior competitive events manager. Christine has been a classroom FCS teacher, as well as the Missouri State FCC LA advisor. So thank you, Christian, for taking the time and joining us. Welcome!
Episode Notes:
• I like to think about FCCLA as kind of a menu at a restaurant, and no one in the right mind is going to go in and say, I think for dinner, I’d like one of everything to start off with. Instead you’re like, I’m gonna try this this time, and maybe when I come back next week, I’m gonna try another entrée and I’m gonna see what I like. And it’s kind of the same thing with CCI. You look at national programs that you look at competitive events and you say, What do we like, what works with our program… What works with what I teach in the classroom? And then those are the things we go back and forth to all the time, instead of trying to stop our program and stuff ourselves with everything that is available, because family consumer sciences is such a broad content area that there are many opportunities for students and rightly so but not every opportunity is for everything, so sometimes you have to think about it that way as well. (2:48)
• I think one of the best things about not just competitive events, but FCCLA activities and overall, is that we do encourage students to take leadership in this so that it doesn’t all fall on the shoulders of the advisor, the advisor is the one who sometimes introduces it to students, but now that students can see things across the country in virtual ways, they’re actually maybe bringing this up to an advisor saying, Hey, did you know we have skill demonstration events, did you know we have knowledgeable where teachers may not have had the opportunity to have experience with those, but students see them and then they can start taking the lead in researching what are they about, what are the requirements, and then really leading their own chapter into those areas. (7:01)
• That’s why I always say ask the state advisor for some guidance in that, and usually they can also help pair you up with someone else maybe in your local area who is more experienced with FCCLA, and so that’s… Again, I just can’t emphasize enough the value of the state advisor in this. In the last 10 years. We’ve started doing online chapter service events for FCCLA. A little bit different than what we did was pandemic with virtual Star events, but if you really want to see what a chapter does, we have a virtual online event called FCCLA chapter website, we always need volunteers to judge that. And so what a great opportunity to be able to get on your computer, go to these websites, use the criteria, and then you really get to see what all these chapters are doing, so that’s a great opportunity for, especially someone who is pretty overwhelmed and doesn’t understand how all the pieces fit together quite yet. (17:38)
• One of the things that makes FCCLA, I think a little more unique is the way that we choose the evaluation teams for competitive events, our ideal team would be having one student leader being a member of that evaluation team without a student perspective, a chapter advisor is the content expert, so that they… They’re the ones who best know family consumer sciences to that person, and then the third person is a business and industry person, so whether that individual is human resources, whether they’re in culinary field or inter-design field, they’re the ones who can bring in that business and industry perspective and knowledge of what’s happening right now in that career field, and so that’s really our ideal scoring and evaluation team, just having those three perspectives and voices. (25:50)
• We have some very significant scholarships available to students, and so the best really way to look at what’s all available is to go to the FCCLA national website, there is a full section about competitive event scholarships, and then also some states have additional scholarships for students, so I think that brings us to number four. So maybe the number five take away is that your students can do this, and you as a chapter advisor, you can do this, it is start small, build success, and sometimes just combine and just do it. (28:10)
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WHEN DOES IT AIR…
DECEMBER 8th, 2021