Ethnoarts Internship

Completing a well-designed and well-implemented internship yields three important benefits. First, the Arts Specialist makes relationships and develops skills that serve as emotional and professional anchors for the rest of his or her career.  Second, though the Arts Specialist is in a primarily learning phase, the community and program she works with will benefit from her participatory research and encouragement. Third, the entity can observe how ethnoarts approaches work in a single context, allowing application to other language programs.

• The ways in which SIL serves worldwide are changing, and the concept of an internship period for a new Arts Specialist is an ideal. In many cases, new personnel may be assigned to a situation in which creativity and flexibility are needed to find ways for them to gain the field experience they need to succeed in serving language communities and assist with SIL projects. The Global Arts & Ethnomusicology office can assist with designing an appropriate internship period for new personnel alongside the SCO they are assigned to.

• After foundational training, the Arts Specialist spends time in a community situation to develop lasting relationships, skills, and knowledge.

• The Arts Specialist will arrive with tools and training allowing them to be self-directed to a degree. However, they will need at least two types of guidance and support to thrive in their new anchoring community. 

  • • • The welcoming organization (perhaps an SCO) provides someone local to mentor the Arts Specialist relationally and practically into the community. This could include input on language and culture learning, spiritual growth, administrative oversight, and other areas. 

      • Area and Global Ethnoarts leadership provide someone to mentor the Arts Specialist in their professional work. This will occur through regular communications and on-site projects as possible. Here is a framework developed by Katie Frost that describes the possibilities and limits of consulting new Arts Specialists from a distance, on-site (short term), and on-site (long term). 

• The most important thing is for the Arts Specialist to get to know one community, its culture, and arts as deeply as possible.

• We will know that an Arts Specialist is succeeding in her ethnoarts work by reflecting in two ways:

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 their completion of particular tasks and products, mostly emerging from activities in Creating Local Arts Together: A Manual to Help Communities Reach Their Kingdom Goals. They will devote their 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. They will add what they learn to a Community Arts Profile (CAP) dedicated to the language community and initiate ethnoarts activities. The table below identifies possible related activities as explained in the CLAT Manual.