English Academy for Newcomers
In 2020, English Academy for Newcomers (EAN) hosted four student interns from UU’s MA Intercultural Communication. Kinan Alajak, EAN Executive Director, reflects on that experience.
The students’ projects targeted two distinct programmes of our organisation. One dimension explored the intercultural interaction during online classes in the English learning programme, and the other targeted the effectiveness of the communication between mentors and mentees in EAN’s mentoring programme. The students who participated, Matilde Bignotti, Frederica De Tullio, Laila Birznieks and Leilani Korringa, were supported by the academic supervisors from their MA program and CBR coach Roselinde Supheert.
The Input of Student Interns
As a non-profit organization, EAN works primarily with volunteers who are not always able to dive into theory or to help evaluate our daily operations. What was particularly valuable about the project is that it encouraged us to pay more attention to specific dimensions of intercultural interaction. It is not that we were not focused on intercultural communication. We work with a vulnerable group and our teachers are well-prepared for this kind of engagement. However, the presence of student interns forced us to become more explicit about our goals and more systematic in how we meet them. Moreover, we found the participation of CBR interns to be a great time investment. I talk to other organization leaders who say interns are time-consuming. They certainly do require attention, but at the same time there are aspects of our work we cannot address on our own. Students can dedicate time that we do not always have. The fact that there is committed teacher team behind the CBR interns stimulated the cooperation positively and took a lot of the pressure off of us as stakeholder.
Managing Expectations
It is simply important to manage the expectations of both student interns and representatives of civic organizations. The cooperation with the four CBR interns lasted about three months, including phases like outlining the project proposals, collecting data and formulating final reports. For EAN, the most interesting aspect of the cooperation entailed bringing in insights of intercultural communication and then applying them to the sensitive areas for our target group (refugees). Despite the fact that it was a short-term project, it provided us with good seeds to start with, and student interns who later worked with EAN have been able to build on the work that these CBR students had already done.
There were some discrepancies between the proposal formulated and the implementation, though, falling short the expectations on both sides initially. We learned that a project of a few months is too short to deliver something big, but a cycle in which the next group of students picks up on the work of the previous CBR students can accomplish more. The first group put in significant efforts but could not dive too much into detail, but the next group was able to produce results which could be published in a form of the online database. In addition, one of the former CBR interns, now graduated, works in our organization regularly.
Translating Research Skills into Practice
I think that research skills acquired at the university can be effectively translated for the purposes of stakeholder organizations. The refugee crisis is a hot topic in Europe at the moment, and we are approached by students who express interest in working with refugees but seem unprepared to explain “why” they want to do this. Given the vulnerability of the group we are working with, the specific motivations of potential interns is crucial. A good thing about the CBR project was that it supported students in delivering results in a common language that we all understand.