Faculty Internships

A major professional development activity of the CTL project at UGA was the opportunity for project faculty members to participate in an intensive one-week summer internship in business and industry work settings. The internships were designed to give university professors the chance to experience first-hand the applications of their subject disciplinary knowledge in authentic work settings by serving as workers or observers in various community workplaces. The purposes of the summer internships were to enable faculty participants to use their internship experience to incorporate issues, applications, and examples from work settings into instructional approaches used by teachers in schools and to better connect learning with its uses in various "real life" contexts.

Internship: Ocean Alliance and Whale Conservation Institute, MA

During the summers of 1999 and 2000, ten CTL project faculty participated in individually-designed one-week (40 hour) internships in business and industry settings. Faculty interns identified individual goals related to their teaching field, contacted and arranged internship activities with a business or industry of their choice, interviewed workers and managers on-site, observed job processes, and participated in hands-on work tasks as appropriate. They were asked to keep a journal of their observations and insights, and to develop a portfolio or final report of their experience and its applications to teaching. Following is a listing of the departments and internship sites for the ten CTL faculty interns:

Faculty Department	Internship Site
Language Arts	Athens Banner-Herald Newspaper
Mathematics Education	Genesis Concepts, Atlanta
Mathematics	Nakanishi Manufacturing Corp.
Middle Grades Education	Athens Municipal Police Department
Occupational Studies	Ocean Alliance & Whale Conservation Institute, MA
Occupational Studies	Athens Classic Center (conventions)
Occupational Studies	Belk Department Store
Science Education	Cofers Home and Garden Center, Athens
Science Education	Home Visions Construction Company, Athens
Science/Genetics	Paradigm Inc., Raleigh, NC