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Journal of Education for Business
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Performed Identity and Community Among
College Student Interns Preparing for Work
Catherine F. Brooks
To cite this article: Catherine F. Brooks (2014) Performed Identity and Community Among College Student Interns Preparing for Work, Journal of Education for Business, 89:3, 165-170, DOI: 10.1080/08832323.2013.801333
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08832323.2013.801333
Published online: 06 Mar 2014.
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ISSN: 0883-2323 print / 1940-3356 online DOI: 10.1080/08832323.2013.801333
Performed Identity and Community Among College
Student Interns Preparing for Work
Catherine F. Brooks
University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, USA
Scholars have yet to gain a sense of how students perform their disparate identities of intellectual and worker as they navigate the potentially dueling aims of content learning and professional job training in internship courses. The author focuses on students in two internship courses in order to ascertain how they socially perform their roles and identities as they negotiate the potentially competing environments of college classrooms and professional organizations. In particular, this project uses discourse analysis to investigate how a professional internship experience can influence students’ concept of self, as well as their social performances across contexts and communities.
Keywords: community, discourse analysis, internship, role, self, student identity, work-based learning
In the 21st century, university faculty members are increasingly under pressure to link theory with practice and to expose students to what some call real-world extracurric-ular experiences. Though activity-based education has been prevalent for decades, the needed connection between stu-dents’ content knowledge and their practice beyond class-room walls has intensified. Scholars such as Freeland (2009), for example, pointed to a kind of revolution in liberal educa-tion involving an enhanced link between intellectual learning and related action.
While some experiential approaches to teaching and learning involve outdoor education programs that grew in popularity in the early 1970s, others emphasize community service or college-level course activities beyond the class-room that are career related and tied to professional devel-opment. Stasz and Brewer (1998), for example, discussed work-based learning and its proliferation in education. Sim-ilarly, Freeland (2009) argued that “colleges frequently em-phasize the availability of off-campus work experiences in their recruiting materials” (p. 8).
Though work-related internships are flourishing and are being hailed across campuses by some, the broader
move-Correspondence should be addressed to Catherine F. Brooks, Univer-sity of Arizona, Department of Communication and School of Information Resources/Library Science, 1515 E. First Street, Tucson, AZ 85719, USA. E-mail: cbrooks4@yahoo.com or cfbrooks@email.arizona.edu
ment toward intensified work force preparation in higher edu-cation may be at a crossroads (Freeland, 2009). A kind of ten-sion exists between those prioritizing intellectual or content learning and those emphasizing practice through real-world experience. In fact, some scholars situate the increasing in-terest in career preparation as endemic of capitalistic tenden-cies. Labaree (1997) is known for his voiced concern for the commodification of education, a situation in which students are conceived as the future labor force and teachers embrace methods of teaching in their classrooms that are beholden to capitalist economies. Researchers have also identified simi-lar sentiments among students. Brooks and Everett (2008), for example, interviewed nearly 100 graduates and identified students’ interest in “job-based learning, or training, over and above a frequently stated desire to do further study ‘for its own sake”’ (p. 61).
Given the crossroad-like environment in which proponents of intellectualism resist the growing revolution for experientialism, and given the discourse of learners as commodities, scholarly inquiry can illuminate how students are faring amid a fractured academic climate. Students’ subjective experiences, identities, and sense of place are im-portant factors in their forming of perceptions of and prepara-tions for the labor market (Tomlinson, 2007). However, few studies have actually explored students’ experiences with work-based learning (Stasz & Brewer, 1998), and scholars have yet to gain a sense of how students may perform their disparate identities as they navigate the potentially dueling
166 C. F. BROOKS
aims of intellectual content learning and professional job training. This study focuses on students in two internship courses in order to ascertain how they socially perform their roles and identities as they move across classroom and busi-ness contexts.
Using discourse analysis as an interrogative tool, this study addresses the broad question of what students are doing socially in their practice of work and school, and how they negotiate the potentially competing environments of busi-ness organizations and college classrooms. Working from Lakoff’s (2006) discussion of personalized and individual identity, and drawing from Goffman’s (1955, 1959, 1967) sociological work on facework, performance, and contex-tualized self-presentation, this article investigates students’ notions of themselves as well as the construction of student identity roles and relationships within and across learning and working communities. To this end, this article is organized around four primary sections to include (a) a brief discussion of experiential education and a shifting educational milieu, (b) conceptions of identity and community, (c) a methodol-ogy for and the findings that emerged from the present study of undergraduate student interns working in business con-texts, and (d) practical applications of this study and how to enhance this study with additional research. Given the real-ity of a shifting culture of education and related pressures to prepare workers for an increasingly globalized economy, I examine students’ social practices for working through and across differing institutions. More importantly, perhaps, I focus on how students present and conceive of themselves in relation to others across the varying communities of ed-ucation and the professions—identity work not thoroughly addressed in business education literature.
EXPERIENTIAL EDUCATION AND A SHIFTING EDUCATIONAL MILIEU
Many college professors try to link substantive course content to students’ lives, emphasizing the real-world applicability of classroom knowledge. In line with Dewey’s (1938) as-sertions that students are active and interested parties in the educational process, some embrace an experiential philoso-phy in their teaching by taking an activities-based approach in their courses. Learn-by-doing classroom pedagogies have profoundly influenced the contemporary college environ-ment, and as mentioned previously, courses involving ac-tivities such as internships, service-related contributions, or work in the field are quite common across college campuses (Katula & Threnhauser, 1999). While many of these types of courses might be indirectly tied to positive outcomes (e.g., an interest in volunteerism, a globalized or international per-spective, preparedness for the 21st century workplace), how these students conceive of and engage themselves within and across communities remains unclear.
What is consistent as well is that many of these real-world student experiences on college campuses are career related, and indeed, students are focused on job-placement and practical concerns. Scholars and teachers continually grapple with the desire to maintain disciplinary tradition and the seemingly incompatible need to adjust teachings in order to prepare a workforce (Sperling & Dipardo, 2008). Though a particularly extreme focus on out-of-class activ-ity may be considered revolutionary in education (Freeland, 2009), the academy might also be witnessing “a commodified form of education winning an edge over useful substance” (Labaree, 1997, p. 73). In line with Labaree’s assessment of the current political environment, the College Board points to the development of the future work force by suggest-ing, “unlike the 20th century, in this new world a college educated citizenry is vital to the well-being of the United States” (College Board, 2008, p. 28). Students, then, are in-deed situated in a particularly contentious and market-driven milieu.
An internship course in which students spend time in a classroom reflecting on time at work is one way professors create an experience to address the dueling academic pur-poses of workforce development and disciplinary mission. Katula and Threnhauser (1999) pointed to both content and career-related growth in these courses, contending that the two primary purposes served by an internship are “to of-fer students an understanding of organizational structures and...an opportunity for professional development” (p.
247). An internship position, therefore, can offer students the hands-on experience through which they might gain knowl-edge and learn formalized content while being positioned and trained for the business marketplace. An internship po-sition is thus a distinct kind of experience in which theory and practice collide and, therefore, provides a focal point for examining how students are faring amid a potential academic crossroads.
THEORETICAL CONSTRUCTS: IDENTITY AND COMMUNITY
As a mildly contested term, identity can carry differing meanings. Tracy (2002) considered identity “a term rich with meaning” (p. 17), and describes the relatively stable notions of selfhood alongside dynamic talk-based perfor-mances. This study assumes that an internship experience might influence students’ identities with regard to their selves as well as their contextualized performances across differing contexts and communities. Indeed, identity is not only an in-dividual’s personal sense of self, it is something that is in mo-tion, continually constructed through social interacmo-tion, and performed in relation to others. Educators can imagine how intern students’ identities—notions of themselves in relation to others—may be caught up in a kind of transitory space
that lies somewhere between notions of learner and profes-sional. Students may enact a kind of hybridized experience as a professional trainee across work and school contexts. Alternatively, students might deploy particular identities that shift across contexts. Here, then, I investigate how students see themselves and also how they conceive of their social performance across the classroom context and the business organization.
Closely related to identity work are the constructs of so-cial roles and facework, both of which are enacted in relation to a communicative partner. Roles are conventionalized and expected behaviors that can shift, depending on an interac-tional partner, and multiple roles can be performed at any time (Sperling, 1995). According to Goffman (1967), role perfor-mance is either in line or out of line with socially agreed upon and expected behavior in particular settings. Student interns may perform concomitant roles of professional worker and casual learner, for example, and they likely engage in par-ticular kinds of facework in order to deploy an appropriate personal display and to embody certain and expected roles at particular moments. While some researchers (e.g., Brooks, 2008; Sperling, 1995) have discussed the importance of roles and relationships in the learning process, this study assumes that the continual shifting across students’ classroom and field-related experiences might give rise to new or amal-gamated student roles previously overlooked in educational research. Students may find themselves in particular quan-daries as they attempt to perform as active professionals while being situated as learners within the classroom walls. Simi-larly, students may struggle to break out of their intern role as they try to find belongingness in professional communi-ties. Indeed, students as workers likely engage in particularly dramatic role shifts when they move across educational and busines contexts.
As students deploy particular roles and as they try to perform appropriately across contexts, they likely seek ac-ceptance within communities tied to those differing environ-ments. For the purposes of this research, community is a social construct referring to relationships created and main-tained within a group. A sense of community is a feeling that an individual matters to others in a group (McMillan & Chavis, 1986). Students who are navigating identity-related role shifts are likely vulnerable when facing new social net-works tied to formalized internship experiences. Community, then, is likely what they ultimately seek as they manage their new networks and environments. Beyond job placement and career preparation, that is, these students most likely want be socially accepted as they move from the classroom to the professional organization, and back again. It is thus argued here that an investigation of the discourses deployed in stu-dents’ talk about their experiences—a study such as this one described in detail in the next section—can help to unpack the complexities at work when students navigate a shifting social terrain across instructional and professional contexts and communities.
METHODOLOGY: THIS STUDY AND RESEARCH FINDINGS
The data analysis for this project came from an examina-tion of the final course writings of 22 female college students enrolled in two formalized internship courses on a public uni-versity campus. The aim and scope of this research was not meant to offer a gender analysis in the way that some projects are designed to do (e.g., Gracia, 2009; Lesnick, 2005). Rather, this study targeted students enrolled in internship courses on one campus yielding a sample comprised of women only.1To
examine how students situate themselves personally, contex-tually, and relationally, I focused on what students said (e.g., the content of their writings) and also on how students talked (e.g., how their language gave off a sense of their identi-ties and subjectiviidenti-ties) in their responses to five prompts that were part of their final course reflections. Ultimately, I ad-dressed the following research question: How do students’ experiencing a professional internship perform and conceive of themselves in relation to others across communities of learners and workers?
This study was an interpretive discursive analysis of stu-dents’ talk (in the form of written narratives) about their classroom experiences. As Tracy (2002) suggests, talk gives off a sense of communicator identity, and as Gee (2005) ex-plains, discourse is both day-to-day communication patterns and broader societal meanings. Both talk and discourse refer to those linguistic practices that offer a means through which it is possible to see the construction and situating of selves in particular contexts.
This research took place in two lower division work intern-ship courses that were designed to support students’ learning as they gained work experience in varying types of busi-ness professions. Students found their own internships for the courses involved in this study, but in some cases, their professor assisted with work placement. Twenty-two female undergraduate students’ final reflections turned in for their internship course comprised the data set for this project.
For the purposes of this research study, the students were asked to write responses to the following five questions as part of a final reflection task that was assigned in both intern-ship courses: (a) How do you talk, look, and behave in your day-to-day interactions as an intern?; (b) How do these per-formances differ from your role as a student?; (c) How does having to play this new role effected if at all your concept of self?; (d) How do you know how to present yourself as an intern in a professional setting?; and (e) Please share your perspective on your internship experience overall. Both pro-fessors assigned these final questions for research purposes and asked that they be turned in to each of their respective online course learning management spaces. All of the final reflection assignments were downloaded and saved for anal-ysis.2
Data analysis focused specifically on students’ talk, pro-viding indication of these students’ particular experiences.
168 C. F. BROOKS
Interpretive analysis involved a broad reading, then re-reading of the students’ writings that were organized over time from specific data points as codes to grouped codes, and then to the broader themes and generalizations offered in this article (Miles & Huberman, 1994).
FINDINGS
Identity, Students’ Sense of Self, and Personal Meaning-Making
In a general sense, students utilized many adjectives for describing how they were influenced by their internship experience. Lisa3 reported that she learned to be
“respect-ful, punctual, and efficient,” Mary described feeling like a “mature adult,” and many talked about achieving a sense of “confidence” through their internship experience. Indeed, most students made positive remarks, reporting a general sense of “feeling good” about their experience. Karen talked about feeling “amazing,” Mod suggested that through her in-ternship experience she grew into a “real adult,” and Cindy offered these encouraging words:
[This experience] gave me a better sense of direction in life and it even helped me better understand what I want out of life after college....[It] helped me find so much happiness
and comfort with who I am as I person.
While students often began with a series of broad descriptors and grand positive statements relative to their internship ex-perience, closer examination uncovered the richness of how these students made meaning of their experience.
One of the most salient themes in the data was that of workplace readiness as an outcome of their internship ex-perience. As described up front in this paper, the discourses of student as future laborer and education as commodity for work prevail as part of the contemporary milieu, and several of these students emphasized a future job-related focus in their narrative. Ann, for example, suggested that the people involved in her internship experience were “willing to help in starting a career,” and Karen reported that, “Even though I don’t have a secure job, I feel like interning is providing me with a stable foundation to build on.” Mod wrote, “I hope I can get a job when I graduate,” Sue identified the importance of getting a “foot-in-the-door,” and Mary, felt “ready to enter the professional world.” Indeed, these students were focused on job preparation.
In contrast to the professional growth that most students identified at some point in their reflective writings, feelings of inadequacy also prevailed. Angie talked about feeling under-appreciated, and she wrote, “I feel more afraid and insecure about the future just because of this internship.” Missy de-scribes her feelings about those working in the professions,
“I know they are all in their 30s and 40s but I still stress out thinking, how am I going to get to where they are?” Ann offered a similar reference to all of the interns working to get jobs by writing that she feels “like a little fish in a big sea of students who all want to do the same thing.” Missy wanted to be liked, and she admitted, “Sad to say, I do care what people think about me and I like knowing that people are accepting of me.” Georgette addressed the trouble with negative feedback most directly:
At times, I felt underappreciated....Whenever I made one
little mistake, negative feedback was always given...it hurt
my feelings. I am not good at taking criticism and usually take it personally, so it was hard for me to deal with. The negative feedback is definitely what I’ll remember over the positive feedback.
While Sue regretted not asking “for a lot more feedback,” most students identified negative feedback and related face-threatening communication as the source of anxiety.
Performed Identities and Contextual Differences
In terms of presenting themselves in particular ways, nearly all students described the importance of dressing and speak-ing professionally in the workplace by talkspeak-ing about such things as being “punctual,” wearing “heels,” and “speaking articulately.” Lisa spoke of wearing business suits and avoid-ing slang “in order to demonstrate that I take my position seriously.” Emily mentioned the role of humor by saying, “jokes are usually expected to take a back seat,” and she explained that she avoids terms such asdudeorlady.
Many of these students compared contexts, and pointed to dress and speech as being lesser in importance in a classroom when compared to a business setting. In reference to the classroom, Lisa reported, “I often show up with wet hair from the shower and do not have a pulled-together look,” and Georgette said that at school, “I can dress any way I desire.” Erin talked about wearing “sweats and Uggs for a lecture-hall class.” Missy described her personal displays in the internship as a “different” kind of performance in relation to presentation as a student—the student manner is situated in her narrative as a default performance:
When I am at my internship, I notice myself speaking and carrying myself in a completely different manner than I usu-ally do. When I wake up the mornings, I make sure to put myself together in formal attire, with my hair done, makeup done, and appropriate clothing for the workplace. I carry myself differently as well....I notice myself walking taller,
smiling more, and using different words in my vocabulary that I didn’t even know existed. I don’t say the word “like” nearly as much as I normally would, and I annunciate my words very well also. I use the words “absolutely,” and “of course,” more often...
Missy, while pointing to the importance placed on dress and talk that so many of these students emphasized, situates her performance as a student as the default mode of display, with her intern behaviors differing from her norm.
One student, Mandy, was unique in her ability to describe a presentation of herself that works across contexts:
I have found a perfect balance between being a young adult woman, an intern for a governmental agency and a student. I have developed a professional, business/college prep attire, which is appropriate for a corporate environment, and then can be dressed down for school...I am classic, yet young
and relevant.
Mandy is a blend, a hybridized version of student worker—she has found a way for her attire and performance to be relevant across contexts.
In addition to dressing and speaking professionally to dis-play themselves appropriately, many students identified the importance of blending into the workplace. Mary mentioned, “I dress in such a way that others could not pick out whether I was a professional or an intern.” Karen wanted to “inte-grate” herself, and she said that “I tried to assimilate myself with what they were doing.” In reference to the employees of her organization, Crissy described trying to “pick up on their mannerisms,” and Tina discussed the “truckers” she worked with, and how their “potty mouths” rendered her performance more relaxed so as to match the style of others in her workplace.
In contrast to the concern for blending and socially inte-grating into the workplace, a number of students identified the individuality inherent to the educational setting. Mary said that, in the classroom, “people around you are not eval-uating your performance, whether you get an A or a B in the class does not affect them.” Jan wrote that she does “not feel the necessity to demonstrate competence” in the classroom and Karen said, “I haven’t really been too motivated to make myself a vital part in the classroom. I have never really felt like I had to strive to ensure myself a position.” Ultimately, it seems these students cared little for what others thought of them in the classroom. Many of them talked like Missy who said, “At school...it is all on me....I am the only one
judging myself.”
Beyond students’ situating work as collaborative and school as individualized, some, such as Crissy, described differences in social accountability across contexts:
School is much different because it isn’t an industry that one needs to break or make their name known in. At school...I
participate when I can, but most of the time I’m just counting down the minutes until I get to go home. At school I don’t run around trying to get be known to all of my classmates or professors, as I do at my internship. At work when I am given a task, I complete it to perfection the second I am assigned it. When it comes to my schoolwork, I generally
wait until the last minute and sometimes do not perform to my best ability...I make up for my laziness from school at
my internship, where I am constantly trying to be one step ahead of everyone else.
With her segment of talk, Crissy identified an accountabil-ity difference across contexts, and other students described similar differences. Lisa wrote, “For my internship, I rely much more heavily on my relationship with my supervisor than I rely on my relationship with my professor for class.” Karen said more directly, “as a student, you aren’t required to build relationships.” In addition to being beholden to peers for work and connection, accounting for image seemed to matter very little at school as Missy explained, “I am much more worried about the way others in the industry perceive me,” and Ann wrote about her peers in class, “I am not always so worried about impressing them or learning from them.” Peers’ opinions, then, mattered little for many of these stu-dents.
Selves in Community, Developing Relationships, and Seeking Belongingness
Many students seemed to prioritize a networking aspect to their internship by emphasizing the need for social tions. Ann identified the importance of “making connec-tions,” and Crissy similarly wrote that she had been “making as many connections as I can.” Though Angie found herself without community as she talked about not belonging, being looked down upon, and not liking the “lack of teamwork,” most experienced a sense of community at their place of work. Cindy, had this to say:
The person I was interning for slowly became my mentor through this process and I am extremely grateful to have been able to develop a life long friendship through this experience.
Georgette, similarly described a collegial workplace com-munity: “At the end of the internship, the environment ended up being more like a family circle, rather than co-workers. I truly felt the office was my second home.”
PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS AND FUTURE RESEARCH
In terms of educational practice and preparing students for work in Business, findings presented in this article may help illuminate avenues for classroom intervention in the stu-dent internship process. It could be possible, for example, to mitigate some of the distress students may suffer with re-gard to feeling left out of the professional network within the organization. Angie, for example, did not feel like she was part of the organizational team. Georgette admitted the
170 C. F. BROOKS
difficulty with accepting negative feedback. In classrooms, it is possible to teach about social networking, political hi-erarchies, and prepare students for the possibility of being rejected from an organizational community. Moreover, it is possible to focus on issues of empowerment and motiva-tion (i.e., being in control and self-determined) in classroom teachings—talking about these topics can help to prepare students to manage uncertainty and distress in their business internships and, later, in their professional careers (for re-view of these constructs, see Brooks & Young, 2011; Deci & Ryan, 2002).
This study could be enhanced by additional analysis of how students’ reports resemble conventionalized class-room talk (Cazden, 2001). Additional research might tease out the ways in which students perform as knowers or informants as they respond to teachers’ classroom prompts. Also, given these students’ propensity to offer positive feed-back about their experiences (e.g., Erin said, “My internship experience not only drove me to explore other career possi-bilities, it taught me a lot about the industry, professionalism, and responsibility”), future researchers should also examine expectations for student praise with regard to internship as-signments. Indeed, additional research on the actual process or habits of student interns offering feedback for their teach-ers would be beneficial in the context of training students for work in business careers.
Future researchers should also examine workplace readi-ness given its emergence as a salient theme in the data for this study. These students have identified as future labor and they seem to be wedging their foot in the door. Certainly the discourses of student as future laborer and education as commodity for work are prevalent (Labaree, 1997) in educa-tion, and these discourses are likely taken on by practitioners teaching courses with an experiential component. Future re-search should thus explore how teachers redeploy messages of workforce preparation in the classroom. Moreover, and possibly more urgently, additional research on how teachers most successfully blend the intellectual and the experien-tial into a single course is paramount to deploying the most optimal workplace-based business experiences possible in contemporary education.
NOTES
1. Certainly future researchers may interrogate the gen-dered nature of voluntary internship courses and what populations tend to purposely enroll in work-training classes and programs.
2. Approval from the Institutional Review Board was ob-tained by the author.
3. All formal names used in this article are pseudonyms.
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