Student experience: ELS internship at Cross Your Borders

Within my minor of Environmental Education I decided to do my internship at youth organization Cross Your Borders. The goal of Cross Your Borders is to educate young people (mainly high school students) about injustice in the world and enable them to form their own opinion on different problems. Problems that are discussed include poverty, slavery, refugees, child labor, discrimination and environmental degradation. Through multi-day, interactive projects, school students are stimulated to engage with these problems and possible solutions. During the projects, students compete in groups while they play games, discuss about the content and present their findings. I worked for Cross Your Borders for half a year, during which I had two main tasks. My first task consisted of coordinating the projects on different schools throughout the Netherlands. Multiple interns would be send to a school to facilitate the projects. We were then divided over the classrooms and each intern coordinated their own class within the project. So, as coordinator, I would guide a class of students within the project, usually with the help of their teacher. This allowed me to experience how it is to stand in front of a class and to teach in a project setting. I especially learned a lot from teaching different classes of different educational levels on different schools. Each new location brought new situations and ways of educating students.

My second task, and my main task during my internship, was the development of educational material. Under normal circumstances, I would have spent half of my time on this task, but since schools were closed for three months due to the corona lockdown, my internship consisted mainly of creating the contents of a new game that would be played during projects. For this new game, me and two other interns investigated the production chain of meat (products) and the problems herein. The goal of the game was to inform school students about the problems in the production chains of multiple everyday products. So, my job was to examine current problems in the meat production chain and describe these in a clear and engaging way. This also included finding relevant pictures, video’s and potential solutions to the problems described. During the process I received feedback from Cross Your Borders on how to adapt the materials to the level of the secondary school students. The result was a collection of reports on topics in the meat production chain that students could watch and read.

I learned a lot during this internship and with my work could also contribute to Cross Your Borders as an organization. Through what I learned, I can now develop myself further in the field of education. I myself am interested in educating people about environmental and sustainability issues, and through this internship, I learned valuable lessons that will help me further to accomplish this.

Wouter Venema, student MSc Environmental Sciences (Minor Environmental Education)