Schoolwork, Internship, Apprenticeship, or Ownership

I've just been introduced to an interesting thought regarding my workplace that had never occurred to me before. For anyone reading that is not familiar with the Emergent Media Center's project structure, we hire students for pay to work on projects under the supervision of staff and faculty advisors.

I've always been aware of the fact that this is very different from a classroom experience. In a classroom, the teacher challenges the learner to exercise gains in knowledge through activities that mean little beyond the educational realm; your homework does not profit the teacher in any immediate sense.

This is also different than an internship; while an internship is provided to a learner by a teacher in order to acquire profits and sustain a pool of employees, interns are notoriously buried in menial tasks that are not worth the time and effort of a more skilled worker. This makes for a very long process of gaining knowledge and transforming learner to teacher. Someday, that intern may be the skilled worker laying tedious assignments out onto new interns, but that ladder may be a tall one to climb.

The closest comparison I could come up with is apprenticeships of old; someone would take in a successor to their profession and teach them the craft. This process also allows the teacher a degree of profit based on the learner's progress, and the knowledge gain is steeper. There are no intermediate positions, just a transition from learner to fellow teacher. Still potentially a long process, but more focused on the topic of knowledge gain from the start.

Even this does not suffice to explain the model here at the EMC. Here, teacher and learner both strive for the exact same goals, and may indeed be doing the exact same task. Given how much responsibility for the product is laid in the hands of the learners, one can even argue that the learner's progress, product, and profits become more important than the teacher's. This is not to say that the presence of the teacher is unnecessary or insignificant, but the fruits of the teacher's labor are minimal and sometimes nonexistent.

Having reflected upon this, it truly is fascinating how similar and yet different the dynamics are from classroom to EMC: similar in feeling, but different in realization. While we can only hope that there are never any tremendous failures on the part of our learners, the rewards or consequences of good or bad work have so much more impact than one letter of the alphabet stamped on a paper or inserted into an email. And I think perhaps the teacher's interpretation of the learner's progress is far different. In this space, a major failure can still be an "A moment" if the conclusions and resolutions that come out of that failure express true learning. Here, the process to reach the final product is just as important as what you "turn in" at the end of your time on a project.

The evaluation of a learner's growth is so interdisciplinary here too. Sure, maybe you're a writer, and if this were a classroom environment we would grade you on the script you turn in. But even though you're a writer, we still see and appreciate your communication style and behavior management. You may not be an artist, but we find value in those stick figure storyboards you used to get yourself to the end goal. You didn't have to talk to the programmers, but we admire your choice to learn how your script will be programmed into a game. Teachers don't have the time to observe every moment of work on an assignment in order to grade the process, but aside from it sounding a little creepy, I think our world would see better learners, and ultimately better teachers too, if the entire journey were under examination for praise or critique.

I've digressed a little, but my main point is that I like where I work for all the whos, hows, and whats involved. The process is just as awesomely emergent as all of the products it generates.