Internships

Theory and Practice

Charles Sides, Ann Mrvica

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780895033550
• eBook ISBN: 9781351843485
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

"Internships: Theory and Practice" focuses on the history, theory, value, design, administration, and evaluation of professional internships as an educational experience for college students. Internships are guided, pre-professional experiences that combine academic and professional components as a managed transition to professional careers. Touted by many as an educational innovation for the 21st century, internships (or experiential learning, or apprenticeships, as they once were called) have been a staple of professional preparation for centuries, dating back at least to the earliest documentation in the Middle Ages and no doubt far beyond that.Charles Sides and Ann Mrvica trace this history through primary sources to explore the development of internship experiences over the past 800 years, create an introduction to the topic of internships, and provide a foundation for modern college-corporation partnerships in professional education and training. The authors present specific guidelines and discussions on issues important to corporations, in terms of providing for internship experiences; issues important to colleges, in terms of designing and evaluating internships; and issues important to students, in terms of participating in and learning from internships.

CHAPTER 1
Introduction

School to work, learning by doing, work to learn, apprenticeships, internships. By whatever name we choose to call them, opportunities through which students experience their chosen professions before formally entering into them are in the process of becoming a staple of twenty-first-century education. Internships—the name by which these experiences will be called in this book—are supervised introductory career opportunities provided in partnership between academic institutions and professional organizations. They are not new, however. Their existence is traceable back through centuries of published work and suspected perhaps to the very dawn of humanity itself as each set of skills is passed on to the next generation by persons teaching others through demonstrated and jointly participated experiences.

In some ways, the immediate past century or so may have been an aberration—a time in which learning was inculcated more and more frequently through lecture and book than through experience. If so, then we are positioned to return to a long-proven, successful method of developing knowledge and skills in succeeding generations of professionals.

Aristotle was among the first to explore these important distinctions in ways of learning and being. According to him, techne is identical to “a state of capacity to make, involving a true course of reasoning. All art is concerned with coming into being, i.e., with contriving and considering how something may come into being which is capable of either being or not being, and whose origin is in the maker and not in the thing made” [1]. He differentiates techne from episteme, or theoretical knowledge. In other words, Aristotle’s use and explanation of techne involve the arts and crafts of making things; episteme involves the knowledge about things, or what Aristotle would associate with science. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle envisions techne as a type of activity out of which is created a durable good, a product or state of affairs. This might include an architect designing and building a house, a potter making a goblet, or a physician restoring a person to health. This type of production, which Aristotle called poiesis, can be precisely specified by the maker before he or she engages in the activity. But Aristotle went beyond this concept to explore praxis as well, which he described as “conduct in a public space with others in which a person … acts in such a way as to realize excellences that he has come to appreciate in his community as constitutive of a worthwhile way of life” [2].

While it is far beyond the capacity and thesis of this book to explore these concepts in depth, it is our belief that internships, as a form of learning through experience, exhibit important aspects of techne, poiesis, and praxis, and that through these, knowledge communities are created and sustained throughout one’s professional life. We also believe that these knowledge communities have long been one of the foundational principles of society, and that as knowledge industries become more important to global economies, these concepts will again, in the twenty-first century and beyond, manifest the importance Aristotle foresaw in them. These concepts will be explored more carefully in Chapter 2, Internships as Learning Experiences.

HISTORY OF INTERNSHIPS

Perhaps the earliest reference to internships occurs in Hammurabi’s Code, in which the appropriateness of “bringing a boy into the home of a craftsman” is declared as the “natural way to learn a craft” [3, p. 63]. Similarly, early writings among Greek, Roman, Chinese, and Vedic communities suggest that the employment of internships in order to prepare youths for entry into various skilled fields was widespread and increasingly formalized among developing societies as early as 600 BCE. While Aristotle’s exploration of techne in the Nicomachean Ethics does not specifically refer to the importance of internship in transmitting the knowledge of doing and making to succeeding generations, it is safe to assume that the practice was so common in Athenian society that it did not require acknowledgment.

Current approaches to internship trace their origins at least to the Middle Ages, during which such experiences were controlled by guilds, associations of craftsmen (and in some cases, women) who banded together to promote mutual interests shared by others engaged in their trades. In medieval times, apprentices were engaged for a period of years “while they were initiated into the theory and practice … associated with a particular occupation,” which could include both manual and professional pursuits [4, p. 15]. In the twenty-first century, the professions of law and medicine continue to exhibit aspects of this approach to professional education.

When considering the history of internships, particularly as it concerns the practices of craft guilds and apprenticeship in the European Middle Ages, it is important to remember that society was evolving from the feudal manorial tradition to a burgeoning entrepreneurial, trade-based tradition with the concomitant rise of a middle class. Crafts, trades, and apprenticeships were ways in which serfs and other indentured peoples bought their freedom in the Middle Ages. Although the vast majority of these experiences were limited to men, the importance of this trend becomes increasingly evident when one considers the role of women at the time and how internships could become a means of empowerment and independence in what was largely, for women, a powerless and dependent society.

Women and Internships in the Middle Ages

A considerable collection of written records has survived from the High Middle Ages (thirteenth-sixteenth centuries) both in the form of pipe rolls from particular boroughs, which record persons taking out their freedom in the form of establishing a trade, and from court proceedings that record legal disputes between guild members or against them. While the overwhelming majority of these records mention only men, some establish the participation of women in the trades of the day. And in each of the cases discussed below, one can assume that the women learned their craft through apprenticeship, most likely serving either their fathers or husbands or some other male relative in order to gain the practical knowledge required to enter a profession; in rare examples, as will be seen, the master craftsman may have, in fact, been a woman who then, in turn, mentored other women’s entry into the trade.

As representative of the development of trades, one can consider the York Register of Freemen, which runs continuously from 1273 through the early 1500s. In doing so, it is important to realize that male artisans rarely “set up shop” on their own; instead, it was far more common for a man to wait until he married in order to establish a production system that could include wife, children, and extended family. While the law of the day (femme sole) allowed women to trade in their own right, it was not regularly exercised, except in the case of surviving widows of craftsmen. Yet exceptional examples and even exceptions existed among a wide variety of trades: victuallers, textiles, leather, metals, building, and others.

Victuallers included bakers, brewers, butchers, fishmongers, graziers, hostelers, hucksters, and so forth. At this time, bakers made a variety of breads: white, brown, black, and horse. White bread (wastel, simnel, cocket, or domain) was the finest available and cost approximately one penny per loaf. Brown (bastard wastel or bastard simnel) cost a halfpenny per loaf. Black bread (panis integer) was coarse and cost only a farthing. Horse bread was made from the lowest qualities of flour and was generally considered not fit for human consumption. Because of the importance of bread as a staple in the Middle Ages, there were numerous regulations regarding its production and distribution. While few women are listed as master bakers in surviving rolls, it is suspected by tangential evidence, including the fact that most medieval craftsmen could not afford to set up practice until they had a wife and family, that much of the bread was baked by women.

The same is true of the brewing trade, which was responsible for the creation and selling of alcoholic beverages. The most common association to women in this trade comes in the term “alewife,” which usually referred to a woman who was involved in the brewing trade and whose husband was often in a related trade—baker, for example, because of the related use of yeast. “Evidence shows that women made as much if not more of the ale and beer served in the Middle Ages as men” [5].

Women were at times found in the butcher trade as well, usually following the death of their husbands. Interestingly, legal records indicate a disproportionate amount of the fining of women for leaving dung and entrails in the street when compared with men in the same craft. Fishmongers, too, were at times women, and most readers are no doubt aware of this even subconsciously through the survival of such children’s songs as “Molly Malone,” in which the main character of the song was a seller of shellfish. Like numerous nursery rhymes and folk songs, this one almost certainly dates back at least to the Middle Ages.

The growing association of inns and victualler trades in the Middle Ages provided another opportunity for women. It was quite common for a master craftsmen to have a wife who ran an inn associated with his craft—either in the form of rooms in the main building or in a separate building altogether. The first recorded female innkeeper dates from 1526, though certainly they are suspected from times earlier than this, as court records indicate innkeepers of both genders being prosecuted for a variety of offenses prior to this date.

Textile industries provided an almost natural opportunity for women in the Middle Ages, growing out of their responsibilities for clothes making, which date back into prehistory. Women were tailors, even if the majority of them worked for a master male tailor and remained in obscurity. Some, however, did stand out in wills where they were identified by their trade. One example is Margaret de Knaresburgh, tailor, who in 1398 bequeathed two gold rings and six silver spoons in her will.

Weaving was performed almost entirely by women. Isabella Nonhouse, who purchased her freedom in 1441, two years after her husband’s death, is listed in the York Register as a master weaver. Those women who bought their freedom in such ways began to band together to become entrepreneurs, forming groups of organized female laborers. In the leather trades it was similar, as cardmakers (craftpersons who set metal teeth into strips of leather used for carding wool) were most frequently referred to with feminine pronouns, even in instances where they were never identified.

Even in metal trades there are ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Table of Contents
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Internships As Learning Experiences
• Chapter 3 Internships As Professional Experiences
• Chapter 4 Administrative Responsibilities for Academic Institutions
• Chapter 5 Administrative Responsibilities for Host Internship Sites
• Chapter 6 Internship Preparation
• Chapter 7 Internship Performance Evaluation
• Chapter 8 The Future of Internships
• Appendixes
• Index