What do students communicate about the relationship between school and internships

During the 2008-09 school year, the High Tech High Media Arts internship program underwent significant change, prompting my interest in learning the students’ perspectives on the relationship between school and internships. By understanding the students’ views, I hoped to develop and continue to refine an integrated curriculum that spans school and work. In the first half of this project, I studied students not in my class who participated in internships. In the second half of this project, I implemented projects with my own students who had internships. Students desire simple, coherent curricula that bring internship to school and structure their experiences into personalized, open-ended projects. As the HTH internship program continues to change, the advisory program and academic class provide fertile homes for the continued growth of an integrated experience.