SPEL starts a new year!
By hola | Published | No Comments
After the long, cold holiday season, our SPEL team is warmed up and ready to begin the 2024 spring semester!
Nearly two dozen interns and fellows from D.C. and around the country have come together for our Storytelling Program for Experiential Learning (SPEL). Participants will meet every Tuesday from Jan. 23 to April 30 to experience journalism and professional development. Activities include rapid training sessions on citing sources and the ethics behind journalism, interviewing local artists and makers, hearing from guest speakers from various fields and much more.
“I’ve always been interested in journalism,” says Xavier Andrade, Hola Cultura’s spring communications intern, who is studying political science and communication at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. Andrade is in D.C. as part of his school’s Washington semester program. He says he was searching for an internship that he was passionate about, where he could work in the Latino community and share his heritage. That’s how he found Hola Cultura.
“I want to learn more about how the Latino community is celebrated here…and the issues that they face,” he says. In the future, Andrade wants to pursue a career in the realm of social media, communication and journalism and is excited to gain that experience through Hola Cultura.
Grace Whitsell, a high school sophomore at D.C.’s School Without Walls, was drawn in by the opportunity to publish her work and conduct interviews.
“I’m excited to interview people and just learn about new things happening in D.C… Sometimes I feel a little out of touch, but I think this is a really cool way to be in touch with the community,” she says.
Whitsell is on the Arts & Humanities team, which focuses on interviewing D.C.-area artists and other creatives. This semester, SPEL also has a Society & Culture team focused on explanatory and investigative stories, as well as a Copy Editing team, where interns train to become professional copy editors. All three teams are led by editorial fellows, who lead each week’s story labs guiding their interns through the process of researching, interviewing and crafting stories.
In SPEL, interns research and write bilingual stories for publication on Hola Cultura’s website. For some, the bilingual aspect is what draws them in.
“A lot of other jobs don’t have bilingualism… I feel like it makes the environment better and it makes the work better,” says copy editing intern Jacqueline Zhang, a senior at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, studying linguistics, Chinese and Spanish.
Zhang hopes to leave SPEL feeling more confident that she can work in a bilingual environment and network with some of the Spanish-speaking people in the program.
Hola Cultura is excited to have this group of passionate interns and fellows, so be on the lookout for their hard work this semester.
– Story by Crystal Lee
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