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Everything begins with high quality, meaningful internship experiences for all students. Internship experiences are facilitated and unpacked by students and educators at school, but ultimately, the work—and the relationships, and the experience of it all—must belong to the students.

Together, students, families and educators seek and secure an internship for each student with a mentor who has sufficient higher education and can offer a full-time project that is meaningful to both the student and the mentor's organization. The intern must work as a true professional.

At internship, over the course of roughly four weeks, interns document their experiences through blogs or journals, responding to prompts. The HTHMA blog that details their prompts can be found at hthmainternship.blogspot.com

Also, at internship, students must take photos regularly and sit down for a recorded interview with their mentor or another significant coworker.

When the immersive component of the internship experience concludes, interns present their learning to a panel of coworkers, teachers and other students.

Upon returning to school, each student processes his or her photos and thoughts into a cohesive photo essay, which is published online and shared with their internship mentor and family. Each photo essay tells one unique story through five photos and accompanying 200 word captions. Photo essays are critiqued in class, and stories, themes and more are workshopped together with teachers and the students who just returned from internship.

Following the online exhibition of the photo essays, each student transforms the recorded interview into a journalistic article and interview similar to what would be found in a variety of literary publications. Each mentor interview gets a headline, sub-headline, introductory article, and a full interview, edited and presented according to professional journalistic standards. Again, these are published online and shared with the students' families, coworkers, mentors and more.

Students then create their own prompt to respond to, and write for it, which generates the pieces of writing and related photography that is published in Ampersand: The Student Journal of School & Work.

The main handouts used in class are found below.

More information can be found on the internship page of Randell Scherer's digital portfolio.