The Construction of a Workplace-Based Learning Opportunity for a Student Intern

• In Event: 56.058 - The Discursive Construction of Learning Opportunities: Developing an Interdisciplinary/Interprofessional Ethnographic Research Agenda for Postsecondary Education

Abstract

Purpose/Objectives
Education institutions and businesses face increasing expectations (Symonds, Schwartz, and Ferguson, 2011 and Porter, 2014), of providing young people with apprenticeships and internships with the objective of making available to them the opportunities to acquire the competencies required by business for their future success. While, the pathways to higher education and the equity issues related to this for students have been widely studied there have been far fewer studies undertaken of the pathways to work places as spaces for learning and teaching and the equity issues associated with these.
The study focusses on how an internship opportunity was constructed including the roles and relationships of the different actors, the actions taken by individuals that culminated in the appointment of an intern and what supported and constrained those actions.

Conceptual Framework: Ethnography as Theory and Method
This study uses an interactional ethnographic approach (Green, Dixon & Zaharlick, 2003) as both theory and method that will, through the analysis of the discourse between different actors over time and their actions, uncover who said or did what to whom, under what circumstances and with what outcomes. By retracing the discursive and other actions of individuals from words and events that can be validated empirically through artifacts within archived data (Green & Meyer, 1991), and by analyzing the language and social processes between individuals directly involved in the creation of the internship opportunity, the study makes visible the complexities that arose in this telling case (Mitchell, 1983) of the process of creating an internship opportunity. The research method affords the opportunity to uncover evidence of the particular knowledge, insights and expertise that individuals brought to the process and the impact of what was communicated which would otherwise not be visible through the simple tracing of the process of recruiting an intern.

Data Sources
The primary data source is an archive of the electronic communications during six months between the actors involved in the construction of an internship. Text types include electronic files containing resumes, notes of telephone conversations, calendars, and field notes. These include notes from the researcher who was also a participant-observer in the process of creating the internship.

Results
The analysis of the discourse between actors provided evidence of differences in the norms and expectations of the actors involved in constructing workplace based internships and made visible the social capital and social relationships that existed before the internship and were drawn upon as resources for establishing an internship, recruiting an intern and securing an internship. The findings from this ‘telling case’ demonstrate that educational institutions, companies, students and policy makers who advocate an expansion of internships may have different conceptions as to what constitutes such learning opportunities and the outcomes to be expected from them.
Scholarly Significance
These findings speak to the need for conversations and collaboration between actors involved in bringing work place learning opportunities into being and those whom they hope to educate to permit the development of shared understandings and creation of opportunities to define norms and expectations.

Author

• Rick Bacon, University of California - Santa Barbara