Ethnoarts Internship

Completion of a well-designed and implemented internship results in 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.

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). 

How do we choose a language community appropriate for the internship? The most important thing is for the Arts Specialist to get to know one language community, its culture, and arts as deeply as possible. So that could be a language that's part of a larger cluster project, if she lives with her anchor community. If she's getting lots of immersion time with her anchor community, she could do a workshop or contribute to planning meetings every so often.

What does the Arts Specialist do during an internship? How will we know whether or not he or she is succeeding? 

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 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.