Literacy Lab Internships

For the 2002-2003 academic year, several of our students will work as interns at local organizations, neighborhood houses, alternative schools, afterschool programs, and in the grassroots/nonprofit sector of the greater Twin Cities area. Students in these internships will explore the connections among a variety of literacy practices in diverse public settings, and learn to develop their academic skills within the real world of community work. By doing do, students will come to understand the practical relevance and importance of these skills in diverse social and cultural contexts. Interns will have the unique opportunity to develop the connection between the "word" and the "world," combining writing and scholarship with engaged work in the public sphere. Because students will be developing their public capacities as citizens and bring their work to life outside the classroom, these community internships thus prepare students in important ways for life beyond the university.

Praxis: reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it.
- Paolo Freire

The idea that you have to advocate teaching for social justice is a sad statement about the state of moral responsibility in our schools and society... The enemy of teaching for social justice is "The Real World," which is characterized as hard, competitive, and unrelenting in its pursuit of personal gain and perpetuation of bias and instutional and economic inequalities.
- Herb Kohl

Learning is doing.
- John Holt