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If we have to keep the same time frame, how si that going to affect curriculum? Which course/s have to be dropped in favor of the internship? How is that  goin to affect course load in some departments with not too many students? In addition, why not having minors as eligible for an internship? I do not see in the Strategic planning nor in SB 1280 anywhere saying that internships need to be done in relation to a major. I think that opening internships to minors too will promote both students wanting to do internships and interdisciplinarity.

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VA Tucker

The problem with internship credit with IDS is the number of people in our programs who are non-traditional students. They would like to use their current job for credit. We have also had issue where someone wanted to use a former job (e.g. working for the sheriff's office) for internship credit related to their field (cybercrime), which brings up the question of if/how prior learning credit might be used for an internship.

What we already do (and what I'd like to do more of) is teach students how to manage the expectations of corporate culture and management discourse in order to move up the ranks and eventually hold leadership positions in their field, using what they've learned in humanities to carefully (and rhetorically) make changes to the organization that improve it and the lower level worker experience. I'd like the internship, then, to enmesh them in the discourse (to use a concept from Bartholomae) and help them practice how to 'play the part' and see how academic and workplace discourse differ.

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Reading through this proposed law, I’m in support of requiring internships and work-based learning in education with the caveat/worries that:

1. The parameters and definition of work-based learning are broad and flexible enough to accommodate our students that are already working full-time in their fields, or are veterans or active military, etc., where a traditional internship path would not be appropriate, helpful, or feasible.

2. Also, if this is something that goes in as a requirement, FUNDING needs to also come to universities to facilitate that as well as funding for private industry for grants/money for paying interns, so small businesses, for instance, can have an intern AND pay them for their labor.

Regarding ODU’s strategic plan, internships seems to fall within Academic Excellence: Goal 2 of “Provide high-impact experiences for all undergraduate students through experiential learning programs” but again, this phrasing is a bit vague, which could be a strength or a problem.

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David Robledo SB 1280

The question of integrating an internship into every students curriculum is daunting. Work based learning seems like the only short term option,. However, how do we define work based learning? Probably the University needs a consistent definition of what this is.

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For us, so much turns on the understanding of "work-based", or, at its base, "work". Is "work" "employment"? We assign our students a lot of work in our classes, but I don't think "work-based" is meant to include that. "Workforce skill" is a useful part of the bill's text to point to. "Work-based" presumably means something like 'based on the sort of work which develops skills that make one part of the workforce'. But this is too broad. For a COMM major, it could be just taking a PR class; for an art major, taking a graphic design class. The missing element seems to me to be working with a client. If e.g. you do PR work as part of the class, and it's with an actual client (internal or external to ODU), that seems like a fit.

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Thanks for the presentations so far, sorry if this seems overly critical or cynical.

1.        I am concerned with how vague everything has been so far. I was hoping to hear some ideas about specific assignments or requirements I might incorporate into my classes to facilitate work-based learning.

2.        While I completely understand the Mellon foundation’s unwillingness to support private companies who should already be paying their interns, I also worry about funneling our humanities majors into low-paying jobs. Is this really our mission as humanities scholars? Humanities was part of a liberal arts education, not to train workers.

3.        Considering that ODU seems to be embracing AI without question, how will this complicate our efforts? Related – how can we help students get jobs when we have no idea what kinds of jobs will exist in a few years?

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A more basic question: what are the primary expectations for individual faculty? Are we tasked with finding willing employers? Or are we primarily helping students apply course knowledge once in those positions?

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Steffon

I feel like the University's emphasis on academic excellence is supported by workplace learning itself and also initiatives like this training. I also feel like it's even more important as a way to help us support underrepresented and first-generation students. Companies should also make it a priority to provide all students, especially those from varied backgrounds, with accessible learning opportunities. If the University and the organizations that we work with approach our students in this way then I believe it will benefit all parties in the long run. I'm here to see how I can contribute to the big picture in that regard.

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Myles here. I always bristle at Strategic Plan language when it comes to a discipline like my own: I'm planning to integrate this material into a Media Criticism course I am developing for the spring, and there’s just no universe where I can say with a straight face that there are “regional and global workforce needs” in the area of cultural criticism even if I would argue that the arts and criticism thereof is a crucial part of our social fabric. That’s not what they mean by “needs,” and so I am allergic to the idea that our goals should all be so carefully aligned with such inherently capitalistic understandings of the world we live in.

That having been said, I’m absolutely in support of the idea of students being required to complete an internship or some form of work-based learning, and feel that as restrictive as Mellon Majors might be in terms of the specific funding of this grant, it does at least start to reframe Humanities disciplines in a more career-oriented lens. As I noted earlier in the chat, there’s something darkly funny about academics who doubled/tripled down on degrees to avoid finding a job with a B.A. or B.S. degree pretending we know anything about the work world as our students will experience it—the reframing of a college education as career training is a scourge, to be clear, but it’s also the bill of goods our students are being sold, and I feel a responsibility to serve that to the best of my ability (while disrupting the ideology at the center of it). The idea of creating at least one space where students get some outside perspective on this is really valuable, and I’m excited to bridge this gap in my own course in terms of conceptualizing the critical, cultural work we do in a more professional context (easier in this case given it’s a thing I do professionally).

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Jim Lyden

Challenges- how do we encourage less motivated student to reach out to employers.

Can a student pursue an internship unrelated to their Field of Study?

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I don't want to say I'm cynical, but when I see things in our strategic plan and the Virginia bill about work-based learning, I'm struck with how much of it is based merely on optics. We spend so much time trying to generate the public relations windfall of doing something like this, it takes away some of our time actually doing it. I realize it's Pollyanna-ish to assume that everyone in this space is operating in good faith, but the overwhelming desire to sell the fact that we're providing work-based learning opportunities for our students seems to be more important than the concrete outcomes of the actual act of doing it. Bad public relations! Bad!!

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Gary Beck: So my thoughts on this are that it's a great initiative to help fund our students. In the Comm major, we've noticed that students avoid BA because they are scared of foreign language, but many have a humanities focus or goal of career. They end up in our BS. Those students, doing the same internship position as the BA student, miss out on the funding. Hard to intern side by side with a classmate that is getting funded while you are not because they could handle 9 credits of foreign language. Maybe a small % of students but we will be advising these kinds of challenges.

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Kerstin Steitz

Dept. of World Languages and Cultures

She/her

I do not drink coffee

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Oge Nwandu-Vincent

Monarch Humanities Internship Academy AD

She/her

Favorite ice cream flavor: cookies and cream

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Barbara Blake

ED, MICO/MHIA

she/her/hers/herself

I love to travel and I have lived all over the world: Leeds, England as well as Spain, Mexico.

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Dylan Wittkower

Philosophy and Religious Studies

he/him

Ten fingers, but only if thumbs count

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Michael C. Carhart

History

he/him

so we're putting together a potluck with coffee, ice cream, and mangoes?

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Gary Beck, Communication, he/him, I eat eggs most mornings.

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Elle Tyson

Academic Success Center

She/Her

I love apricots

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Dave Robledo, he or they

boring fact is I drink 3 cups of coffee a day and none on Sunday

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Liz Zanoni

She/her

History

I like blue ice cream

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Steffon Campbell

He/Him

Communication and Theatre Arts

I hate raisins!

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Meg Boeshart

She/Her

English / Writing Center

My favorite part of Zoom is when people's pets show up to the meeting.

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Kole Matheson, English, he/him. My favorite color is purple.

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Myles McNutt

Communication and Theatre Arts

He/His

My boring fact is that I looked at this ice breaker in advance and spent way too long trying to determine what qualifies as a boring fact.

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Lee Ellen Knight

Women's and Gender Studies

She/her/they

I love earthworms and always bring them to one of my environment and climate change classes--not all of the students share my enthusiasm (boring or disgusting depending on the student :).

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Emily Hill,

GA eP, Lifespan Communication MA

She/Her/Hers

I am drinking some chai this morning!

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Sarah Lacy

English

she/her

Trying to switch from coffee to tea... its not going well

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Virginia Tucker Steffen

English and Interdisciplinary Studies

she/her

I once wrote a paper about who & whom

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Jim Lyden

He/Him

Theatre

I like coffee

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Elizabeth Fretwell

she/her

History

I like ice cream.

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Brendan O'Hallarn

Communication and Theatre Arts

He/Him

Taylor Heinicke superfan

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Luis Guadano

World Languages and Cultures

He/His

Go Spain for the Euro Soccer Cup!!!

Spanien uber alles!!! Sorry Kerstin!!!

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Nick Abbott,

History,

He/His

I am not allergic to mangoes.

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Strategic Plan & WBL or SB 1280 Freewrite

Participants engage in a free write activity related to strategic planning and work-based learning. (10 minutes)

Discuss key words, questions, or topics that are emerging thematically. (10 min)

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Session 1: WELCOME! Please click the + in the bottom right hand corner to add your intro.

Name

Department

Pronouns

And a BORING fact about yourself!