Harvard Internships

Internship 2024

Meet Our Internship Coordinators!

	Isabella Madrigal is an enrolled member of the Cahuilla Band of Indians and is of Turtle Mountain Chippewa descent. A senior at Harvard College, Isabella is concentrating in English, with a specific focus on screenwriting/playwriting, and is pursuing a secondary in Psychology. Isabella was a 2023 Pre-Texts Intern in Banning, CA where she worked alongside her sister, Sophia Madrigal, and the Dorothy Ramon Learning Center, an Indigenous cultural center dedicated to preserving and sharing Native American cultures, languages, histories, and traditional arts. The Dorothy Ramon Learning Center was founded by Cahuilla/Serrano elder Ernest Siva and, with his support, Isabella and Sophia facilitated participants of all ages in arts and literacy workshops focused on traditional Indigenous language, song, and story revitalization using the Pre-Texts methodology.
	I’m Joshua Peck, a sophomore at Harvard studying Psychology and Educational studies. I’m also a jazz musician and I play tenor saxophone. I first encountered Pre-Texts in a freshman seminar with Doris Sommer where I became enamored with the creativity, simplicity and effectiveness of the methodology. This past summer I worked in Paraguay as an intern facilitating and participating in Pre-Texts workshops with members of the Instituto Desarollo (ID). Our workshops covered topics such as education, philosophy, gender, and the treatment of indigenous people to name a few. Over the summer we worked with college-age students at ID, members of the deaf community, teachers at ID, members of the greater community interested in education, and with Guarani-speaking kids in the countryside. I am committed to advancing literacy and the arts throughout the world.
	Sophia Madrigal is an enrolled member of the Cahuilla Band of Indians and is of Turtle Mountain Chippewa descent. A sophomore at Harvard College, Sophia is double concentrating in English and Psychology, with a specific focus on screenwriting/playwriting, and is pursuing a secondary in the department of art, film, and visual studies. Sophia was a 2023 Pre-Texts Intern in partnership with the Dorothy Ramon Learning Center, an Indigenous cultural center in Banning, California, that is dedicated to preserving and sharing Native American cultures, languages, histories, and traditional arts. The Dorothy Ramon Learning Center was founded by Cahuilla/Serrano elder Ernest Siva and, with his support, Sophia, alongside her sister Isabella facilitated participants of all ages in arts and literacy workshops focused on traditional Indigenous language, song, and story revitalization using the Pre-Texts methodology.

Internship 2023

The Pre-Texts Internship draws Harvard undergraduates with interests in the arts, education, and social reform and pairs them with organizations around the world. During their eight weeks on-site, interns create and implement Pre-Texts programming towards their host’s goals. In addition to the promotion of primary or secondary language literacy that the pedagogy is particularly well-suited for, interns this year are using Pre-Texts to preserve and spread understanding of indigenous cultures in California, pilot alternative prison rehabilitation programs in Paraguay, teach leadership in Chile, and promote arts integration in Chicago Public Schools. While the potential, institutional impact of this programming in these communities is large, the personal impact of participating in Pre-Texts workshops should not be neglected either. Watch the video to hear the interns’ final reflections upon graduating from their Pre-Texts training.

Emma Fang, Intership Coordinator, 2023

Dorothy Ramon Learning Center
Sophia and Isabella Madrigal worked with the Dorothy Ramon Learning Center with a Summer workshop on Indigenous language and culture revitalization in the Southern California area using the Pre-Texts methodology.

Internship 2022

Doris Sommer and Justin Hu facilitated a 15-hour virtual Pre-Text (PT) training workshop for all summer interns. Now the interns are working on implementing the PT with their host organization. We can’t wait to see the final report!

Picture: Avanthika Pulijala

The Pre-Texts training workshop was conducted between 5/31/22 to 6/4/22. We introduced ourselves and jumped right into the text. The sessions were challenging yet pleasurable. Doris spoke about the origins of the Lector and the tobacco factory. Then, Justin read to us an excerpt from The Ignorant Schoolmaster by Jacques Ranciere. We doodled, questioned the text and took turns answering the questions. The Soundtrack activity which followed immediately made me go back to certain lines from the passage. This was one of the moments where my mind started working faster than earlier. A prompt as simple as, “What did we do?” could have numerous developments. We had a bunch of activities which followed. The sound and movement activity, multilingualizing the text and acting it out for our co-participants to guess left us laughing hysterically!

Then came the tangents! The Pre-Texts protocol started getting so much more interesting. Additionally, we also started to branch out and go off on leaves. I started brainstorming and working on an action plan which was going to be useful and practical for me. This was followed by us introducing our implementation plans with each other. And now, we were ready to facilitate and work the Pre-Texts magic with our host organizations.

(Avanthika Pulijala)

Stay tuned to their BLOGS ↓

📝 Aly Accardi Tarmin		📝 Jemma Llewellyn
	📝 Dharma Gonzalez
📝 Alyvia Bruce		📝 Jinsol Jeong
	📝Diana Gandara
📝Avanthika Pulijala		📝Martin Vician
	📝 Emma Fang
📝 Mehrin Faisal		📝 Rediet Alemu