Students in Penn GSE’s Language, Globalization, and Intercultural Studies master’s program are spending the summer working with organizations that support immigrant, refugee, and multilingual communities throughout Philadelphia.
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For students in the Language, Globalization, and Intercultural Studies (LGIS) master’s program at Penn’s Graduate School of Education (Penn GSE), learning extends far beyond the walls of the classroom. A hallmark of the program is its required summer internship, for which students work in community organizations across Philadelphia, applying concepts from coursework while gaining hands-on experience with navigating multilingual and multicultural environments.
According to Penn GSE professor and chair of the Educational Linguistics Division Betsy Rymes, the internship is a key component of the program that has been part of LGIS since its earliest days, helping students connect theory, research, and professional practice.
“If you’re learning to understand how multilingualism functions in contemporary society, you’re going to need to experience it,” Rymes says. “In this field, you can’t just study it in the abstract. You have to be out there and see what’s going on.”
The summer experience is designed as the culmination of a yearlong process. Students first complete community-based service-learning projects during the spring semester before transitioning into more extensive summer internships, often with the same organizations. Rymes describes this progression as “allowing students to build confidence, relationships, and a deeper understanding of the communities they serve.”
This summer, students are working with organizations that support immigrant, refugee, and multilingual communities throughout Philadelphia. Among them are Zade Dohman, Jay Han, Howard Ho, and Anqi Song, whose experiences illustrate how the internship serves as a bridge between academic concepts and real-world practice, enriching their Penn GSE experience.
Dohman, from Spearfish, South Dakota, returned for a second summer as a teaching assistant at Penn’s Netter Center for Community Partnerships. There, he taught literacy, linguistics, and Philadelphia history to West Philadelphia high school students, who, in turn, taught reading skills to elementary school children.
“I had done this internship in 2024 and was so taken by the positive impact it left that I wanted to come back,” Dohman says. “Seeing the chain of knowledge pass down to the high schoolers and then to the elementary students elucidates so much about what it means to be a good educator.”
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