Here's a link to a description of an Ethnoarts Internship for an Arts Specialist in Guatemala.
What is an ethnoarts Internship? After foundational training, the Arts Specialist (ArS) spends 1-3 years in a language community to develop lasting relationships, skills, and knowledge. This anchoring period will increase his or her influence and satisfaction for the rest of his or her career.
How do we design an ethnoarts internship? The Arts Specialist will arrive with tools and training allowing her to be self-directed to a degree. However, she will need at least two types of guidance and support to thrive in his or her new anchoring community.
- The welcoming organization (perhaps, an entity) provides someone local to mentor the Arts Specialist relationally and practically into the language community. This could include input on language and culture learning, spiritual growth, administrative oversight, and other areas.
- Area Ethnoarts leadership provides someone to provide feedback to the Arts Specialist in her professional work. This will occur through regular computer or telephone-mediated communications, and on-site projects as possible. Here is a framework developed by Katie Hoogerheide that describes the possibilities and limits of consulting new Arts Specialists from a distance, onsite (short term), and onsite (long term).
What does the Arts Specialist do during an internship? How will we know whether or not he or she is succeeding?
1. Connection to overarching goals. First, we will evaluate her work by its contribution to these overarching goals: a) growing, interdependent, comfortable relationships with people in the language community; b) increasing knowledge of and appreciation for their arts by the Arts Specialist, families and others in the area, local and regional churches, and others; c) increasing number and quality of actions that connect community artistic genres with increasing signs of God’s kingdom in the population and churches; d) integration of ethnoarts activities into other elements of the internship, such as Language and Culture Learning.
2. Completion of ethnoarts activities and their products. Second, we will assess and guide the Arts Specialist's ethnoarts performance by her completion of particular tasks and products, mostly emerging from activities in Creating Local Arts Together: A Manual to Help Communities Reach Their Kingdom Goals. She will devote her ethnoarts time to the documentation of and participation in as many local ethnolinguistic artistic genre enactments at a basic level as possible, and more in depth documentation of and familiarity with a few genres. Her capstone activity will be initiation of an exploratory Creating Local Arts Together project, going through all seven steps of the CLAT process. She will add what she learns to a Community Arts Profile (CAP) dedicated to the language community. The table below identifies related activities defined in the CLAT Manual.
Activity | CLAT resource(s) |
The following activities are mostly about research and making relationships. | |
Develop an initial list of artistic genres in the community, an Initial Community Arts List. | Manual Step 1 |
Video, audio record several enactments of at least one genre, taking notes and creating metadata to keep track of your recordings. | Manual Steps 1, 4 |
Identify elements of one of the genres that you’d like to understand better, and design and implement analytical recordings to allow analysis of those elements. Elements could include texts of songs, woven materials, dance movements, gestures in storytelling, and so on. | Manual Step 4A, 4B |
Research and analyze one genre according to its social dynamics in the community. This is ethnographic research. | Manual Step 4C |
The following activity provides experience performing the whole research and co-creation process. | |
Perform an exploratory Creating Local Arts Together project. | Manual Steps 1 - 7 |