“From High Skill to High School”

Abstract

From High Skill to High School details the experiences of immigrant professionals in an adult education employment program. This research reveals that immigrants with graduate degrees and years of international work experience are put through curriculum designed for adolescents with limited work experience, and collectively perform more than 1.92 million hours of unpaid work annually in both community-based organizations and for-profit companies. In this mixed-method research project combining institutional ethnography with Reader’s Theatre, the Reader’s Theatre serves as a powerful medium to detail the process of deskilling. While Reader’s Theatre complements the institutional ethnographic analysis by vividly bringing the data to life, representational issues emerge in combining the two approaches. For the playwright, the Reader’s Theatre may seem overly detailed and less aesthetically pleasing. These details, however, are necessary to the analysis as they are vital clues to the social organization of power for the institutional ethnographer.