I didn’t know quite what to expect when I started the school year as Lookout’s Educational Programs Assistant, but I was excited to challenge myself and learn more about the Santa Cruz County community I became a part of a year before, when I started my college journey at UC Santa Cruz. Nine months later, I can recognize what a valuable learning experience this internship has been.
For one, I’ve been able to transfer skills I’ve gained in my academics into a new context and put them to use in a different way. As a literature major, I’ve practiced close reading and careful textual analysis to extrapolate a deeper meaning in my classes, a skill that has helped me when writing weekly educator newsletters for Lookout, in which I must understand and expand on the significance of recent Lookout articles in order to pose discussion questions that teachers are invited to use in their classrooms.
I’ve also been able to expand my ability to structure ideas effectively in text. I’ve grown used to using this skill for formal academic essays, but at Lookout, I’ve been able to practice this in a variety of forms of writing – writing educator newsletters, Inside Lookout reflections about Lookout’s educational initiatives and while conducting outreach. At Lookout, I especially have to consider my changing audience, and let that influence how my tone and how I structure my writing – for example, experimenting with spacing and visuals more than I have in my academic work in order to be attention-grabbing and engaging.
Besides developing tangible skills, this internship has shown me that learning is achieved in more places than just the classic classroom or a lecture hall. Learning can be through community events (such as Lookout’s election forums), through classroom workshops, through internship or work experience, and through challenging yourself to discover what’s possible.
With this year’s Student Journalism Scholarship, students learned what they were capable of, dove deeper into the inspiring stories they’d heard from their community heroes and used their voice to share the stories of these local heroes with the rest of us.
I am proud to have been a part of this project by spreading awareness of it to local educators, reading and evaluating the 130 submissions Lookout received (a new record!), helping to coordinate the winning stories’ publication, and meeting the wonderful winners themselves at this year’s Your Future Is Our Business annual luncheon. I encourage you to learn about the community through these students’ eyes by checking out their “unsung hero” profiles, as well as the rest of the student-authored stories from this school year.
I joined a handful of Lookout’s 20 classroom workshops this school year, which covered a variety of topics, from career panels to the importance of journalism in democracy. Lookout also had its first visit to a middle school classroom, where we talked to a seventh grade science class about the importance not just of science, but also of how to communicate scientific topics.
Exercising my communicative skills, I got to take the lead for parts of the presentation and practice holding the attention of a middle school classroom. Having stickers to hand out to participants definitely helped, but so did paying attention to how my phrasing was landing and making adjustments for the next class.
Because climate change can be hard to talk about, even for adults, we helped students identify effective science storytelling and journalistic practices – information gathering, interview techniques, the value of talking to people affected, how to decide what to include and how to consider one’s audience.
It was a real treat to be invited back to see these students put these fundamentals to work at their Climate Change Symposium, where I saw how each student used their own unique creativity to make the project their own, be it an interactive game, sculpture, comic book, news anchor-style video or something else. To me, this is what learning is all about – curiosity and engagement, no matter where that learning takes place or in what form.
Reading over student reflections after all of these classroom visits, it became clear that the visits not only helped students understand effective storytelling, but also helped them walk away from these workshops feeling empowered to engage more with their local community and keep themselves informed about local issues.
These reflections were motivating to read, and I too look forward to continuing to engage with Santa Cruz County and learning more about this special place. Though I’ll be home in the East Bay for the summer working as a writing tutor, I’ll return to Lookout Santa Cruz next school year as a Lead Educational Programs Fellow.
Ava Salinas is a student at UC Santa Cruz and an intern at Lookout Santa Cruz through the Humanities EXCEL program led by the UC Santa Cruz Humanities Division with strategic support from The Humanities Institute.
