Performed Identity and Community Among College Student Interns Preparing for Work

Abstract

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

Notes

¹Certainly future researchers may interrogate the gendered nature of voluntary internship courses and what populations tend to purposely enroll in work-training classes and programs.

²Approval from the Institutional Review Board was obtained by the author.

³All formal names used in this article are pseudonyms.