by Content Creation Lab youth intern André (United States)
Working on the GNG Alumni internship this summer has been a great experience. It’s always rewarding to be able to contribute to the work Global Nomads Group does and this internship was the perfect opportunity to do so.
This summer I worked with a group of young people from around the world who’ve already had experience working with GNG’s programs to help revise a module-based program to help other young peers navigate and explore different career paths. At the beginning of the internship, I was assigned as a team leader to work on the Science, Medicine, and Architecture modules. At first I honestly was worried that I’d have little to contribute from my personal experience since I have never been particularly interested in either field. But it was soon made clear to me that my placement was intentional; that having members in our team that weren’t previously familiar with the fields they were assigned to would push us to make the topics interesting and the information digestible for those completing the module who also have little knowledge or interest in the field. We would make it tangible.
And in my eyes Tangible is a word that perfectly sums up what all of us on this internship were tasked with doing. We crafted our language to be tangible, by learning in our Accessibility session how often ableist language is overlooked and how important it is to be conscious of our wording. We worked on introducing professional language into our modules but making sure to leave no terms or concepts unexplained. And most importantly we worked on these modules using OUR language. Meaning— we explained the concepts we were working on using the words we felt most comfortable with while making sure it was understandable to everyone in the team. And when discussing certain issues we used our own lived experiences to construct the way we talk about the issue and the examples we decided to include.
“And in my eyes Tangible is a word that perfectly sums up what all of us on this internship were tasked with doing. ”
The first example that comes to mind is the discussions we had on specific issues within the healthcare industry. One of the debates that we needed to lay out was the benefits and harms of single use plastics. And while many of the arguments we had to make were based on research, there were many that were made with our own experiences. We had a member in our group who studied medicine and was able to add depth to our discussion by explaining the harmful effects of medical sterilization using radiation. In other discussions on the healthcare industry, we were able to compare how public and private healthcare systems were different in each of our countries & communities.
All these little details add up and end up establishing a whole new layer of understanding for other young people who end up learning from these modules. And my experience with GNG this summer just confirmed that it is vital for students to learn using language they use and from people that are able to connect the content they learn to the student’s own life.
Global Nomads Group’s Content Creation Lab 2022 Cohort actively created four new Student to Word courses focusing on the important theme of Careers for a Just & Sustainable World: Architecture, Film & Media, Finance, and Medicine & Scientific Research.
