“We’re all learners and teachers”: The Odyssey Project Internship
By Serena Naji, HRI David F. Prindable Intern at the Humanities Research Institute
When asked to describe her internship experience in three words, Jalixa Sanchez carefully considered before answering. She landed on the words “innovative, sustaining, and communal,” which, following a full conversation with her, represent a holistic view of her work with students in the Odyssey Project.
The Odyssey Project provides low-income adults in East Central Illinois access to free credit-bearing humanities courses, taught by instructors at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. As an Odyssey intern, Jalixa, a senior majoring in Spanish, Latina/Latino Studies, and Gender & Women's Studies, is helping to build a welcoming community for students. She facilitates some class sessions while assisting Odyssey students with coursework and the use of learning management systems. She is also spearheading a class archive program meant to help students reflect on their course encounters to further enrich their learning process.
Jalixa was initially inspired to apply to the Odyssey Project internship because of her early career goal of becoming a college professor. Working with nontraditional college students was an opportunity to become connected with the local community and gain a new perspective. While this was her starting point, she has gained new insights through her internship experience and humanities education that have led her towards an interest in archive work.
She is specifically passionate about the distribution and accessibility of educational resources. Working with Odyssey students helped her notice the vast amount of available resources through the university—but also a gap in knowledge on how to take advantage of them.
“It's teaching them, for example, ways that we can use the university library resources, or how you find an article on JSTOR,” she said. “It’s giving them the tools to look for what they need, and showing that if they don't know how to look, they can reach out to people who do.”
Jalixa has developed deeper relationships with the students by encouraging them to feel comfortable asking for help and fully participating in class. She acknowledges she is modeling this behavior herself, and feels she has grown in this environment alongside the students. Once, when she felt anxiety around facilitating class sessions, one student’s encouragement made it less daunting. Jalixa recalled the student saying, “Go on up there, you got this, come on.” The encouragement from Odyssey students showed her they value her success, which she integrates into her philosophy as an intern. Jalixa is consistently fostering a supportive environment in which the Odyssey students feel as comfortable as she has while growing as learners.
“We're all learners and I've made it a point to remind the students, ‘I'm learning with you all,’” she said. “We've all really made an effort to enforce that this is a space of reciprocity. We're all learners, we're all teachers.”
Jalixa is passionate about growth through knowledge, leading her to propose a class archive project that invites Odyssey students to reflect on their class experience in a unique way. Students were given prompts to center their educational reflections around, giving them a choice of various creative formats to create a physical “artifact” representing their responses. Jalixa aims to have the project digitized to help students look back on their immense educational growth in this supportive learning community.
Jalixa’s advice to students applying for the Odyssey Internship? Be yourself. She felt that her application and cover letter were a genuine portrayal of her investment in humanity, care for the local community, and her dedication to those values, which are important aspects of the Odyssey Project mission.
Editor's Note: This story originally appeared on the Humanities Research Institute website.