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Tinkering with CTE at Cherokee Central Schools

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  • At Cherokee Central Schools on the Qualla Boundary, this CTE director wants students to know, "CTE can be for anybody." Learn more about how the program has grown and the pathways it offers.
  • “To me, when it comes to engineering, you learn best by doing things and messing up. You learn more from mistakes than you do from success.” Cherokee Central Schools is building CTE pathways and focusing on incorporating cultural practices as it grows.
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When Heath Robertson was little he was always dismantling toys.

“My dad would call it ‘tearing up my toys,'” said Robertson. “I would take all my toys apart because I was always curious how they work, and then I would put them back together.”

From the beginning, Robertson has been a hands-on learner due in part to the examples set for him by the elders in his life. Robertson’s father passed away when he was seven, and he remembers a lot of, “You might want to pay attention to how to do this” from his dad.

He recalls hooking up the VCR with his father, getting comfortable with audio visual technology even at a young age. His great grandfather had a farm and worked on tractors and asked Robertson to pitch in. The same went later on in life with his father-in-law.

Robertson has been learning how to build and fix items, as well as how not to be afraid of getting it wrong, his whole life.

“To me, when it comes to engineering, you learn best by doing things and messing up. You learn more from mistakes than you do from success.”

Heath Robertson, CTE and STEAM director at Cherokee Central Schools

Tinkering is the word Robertson used to describe all that taking apart and putting back together he did when he was younger. Now as the Career and Technical Education (CTE) and Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM) director at Cherokee Central Schools (CCS), he gets to encourage students to do the same hands-on learning, or tinkering, that he did.

Engineering a CTE program

Robertson started his career at CCS as a history teacher in 2006. A year later, he added football coach to his list of responsibilities. The team had purchased recording equipment that would tape games, and Robertson was in charge of figuring out how the program could slice footage to better analyze offense, defense, and special teams performances. That AV knowledge passed along to him by his father was paying off again, as he was the school video production savant.

In 2014, Cherokee High School principal Debora Forest approached Robertson about teaching engineering because she knew his knowledge of tech from the football team. He said taking on engineering, a class that had never been offered before, was the “best decision ever.”

For his first lesson, he asked students to bring in a toy from childhood.

“We’re going to tear these things apart. We’re going to see how they work,” Robertson recalls of his first hands-on engineering assignment. “Most of them thought I was nuts,” he said, but by the end, they understood the assignment and had fun with it.

He loved that teaching engineering is by nature a more hands-on class with less lectures.

“The cool thing about CTE is you’ve got a lot of freedom,” said Robertson. “As long as you cover the standards, how you do it’s up to you.”

Robertson taught his students to follow the engineering design process. The first step is to research the problem, the second create a blueprint to solve the problem, the third prototype on a small scale, and the fourth and final build at full scale.

In class they made rockets and catapults. He incorporated Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indian culture and challenged his students to make a traditional fish trap. The best research for the fish trap didn’t come from books but from community elders.

“That was probably the coolest project we ever did,” said Robertson. In the end they used rope, because it wasn’t the right season for vines, and tobacco sticks from his father-in-law’s barn.

He taught engineering for seven years, and in 2021, the school received a Native American Career and Technical Education Program grant from the U.S. Department of Education, which created a need for a CTE and STEAM director. Robertson moved into the role and has since helped all CTE courses and programs for Cherokee High School.

One of Robertson’s biggest goals in this new role was to shift the mindset from course completion to CTE pathway. The school now encourages anyone taking a CTE course to become a CTE completer, which means taking multiple CTE courses down a particular pathway.

When Robertson became the CTE and STEAM director, there were two pathways. Now there are 11, along with electives available at the middle school level to get students familiar with CTE courses they can take once in high school.

The CTE pathways now offered at Cherokee High School include food and nutrition, apparel and textile, automotive service, drones, horticulture, health science, nursing fundamentals, marketing, entrepreneurship, 3D modeling and animation, and JROTC.

With the federal grant money, Robertson was also able to start taking students on trips to other indigenous communities, both for college visits and to see CTE incorporation at local high schools.

Last year, Robertson took four seniors to visit Waiʻanae High School, whose student body is 60% indigenous, to see their agriculture and marine biology programs in action. They have their own garden, all student run, and they incorporate cultural practices within their agriculture. The trip had students immediately reflecting on how CCS could better weave cultural practices into their courses.

For Robertson, his goal is to support teachers and encourage students to take CTE courses, because it isn’t a program reserved for a specific kind of student. He wants to continue to grow offerings at CCS and is creating outside school supports to get the community involved, like the CTE fair and internships with local businesses.

“CTE can be for anybody. It can be for people who want to go straight into the workforce after high school, or if you want to go to a four-year college, you can learn so much from your CTE courses,” said Robertson. “It’s not a program for a certain type of student. It is a program for all students.”

Cherokee horticulture classroom whiteboard. Caroline Parker/EdNC
Caroline Parker

Caroline Parker is the director of rural storytelling and strategy for EducationNC. She covers the stories of rural North Carolina, the arts, STEM education and nutrition.