Overview: OSEA Field Study Abroad Trainning Programs

OSEA offers intensive, on-site fieldwork training in ethnography, including medical anthropology and anthropology of tourism, teaching English as a Second Language, community action research, and intensive Maya language. Different programs are available to suit the needs and interests of undergraduate and graduate students, as well as professionals and other persons who are not students who have a need to develop new skills in interdisciplinary research methodologies. The OSEA training programs are designed to be flexible while retaining a structure for hands-on, interactive learning for small groups. OSEA also offers independent short 7-day course in Spanish to help participants gain the most of their immersion and research experience.

Check the weather in Valladolid, 30 mins from OSEA program location in Pisté and Chichén

 
Are the Maya "Mayans"?    On the correct use of the words Maya and Mayan

OSEA Programs currently being offered:

7-Day Intensive Spanish Immersion Courses

Heritage Ethnography Field School

Maya Immersion Language Field School

SELT Teaching English Service Language

Maya Health and Healing — New program starting in summer 2013

We are looking for highly motivated, creative, and flexible persons with a variety of skills, experience, training, and interest not just in cultural anthropology and ethnography, but in any one or more of: photography, video, visual anthropology, theatre arts, staging design, installation, invisible theatre, performance art, studio art, Maya cultures, México and Latin America, Indigenous peoples, history, ethnohistory, art history, epigraphy, archeology, cultural studies, writing, journalism, tourism, museum studies, ESL, multicultural education, critical pedagogy, anthropology of education. This program is appropriate for undergraduate and graduate students of all levels as well as persons who are not currently in enrolled in a degree granting program.

Common Questions:
What is Study Abroad and Field Study?
What is Ethnography?
What is Heritage?

Learn About Previous OSEA Field School Programs (below)

OSEA Ethnography Programs Include Language Study: Maya and Spanish
The OSEA Ethnography Field School or ethnography training programs begin with intensive Spanish and Maya language courses that rely upon "hands-on learning” pedagogies. This first phase of the program includes seminars in Cultural Anthropology and Ethnography. In a second phase of the program, students then conduct their own independent research projects that they have designed in close supervision with OSEA staff. The independent research projects are conducted in Pisté or in a nearby Maya community and require communicative proficiency in Spanish.

During the independent research, the students gather together on a weekly basis in Pisté for a Workshop in Fieldwork. These allow students to share, exchange, reflect, evaluate, and compare their own and their colleagues research activities. Students are encouraged to develop independent thinking, autonomy, self-reliance and integrity.

The Intensive Maya Language Immersion Program begins and ends learning Maya! Students will benefit from prior coursework in Spanish, although this is not required for acceptance into the program. In the Maya program students can be provided basic conversational Spanish on an ad hoc basis as means to help them learn Maya.

The SELT Teaching English Service Learning Program requires students to have basic conversational proficiency in Spanish to be able to teach. Participants learn basic Maya in the course of the program as part of their the ethnographic and pedagogical process of teaching English to the community. See Program description for more details.

OSEA Programs Include Educational Excursions and Culture Field Trips
Ttraining programs include educational trips to major sites of attraction. Summer programs have recently included trips to Rio Lagartos, Tihosuco and the Ruta de las Iglesias, Yaxuna ruins and cenote, Chichen Itza.

In the January Programs, students attend major religious holidays and visit archaeological sites. The semester program includes a group trip to the Mexican Caribbean as well as a week of spring break.

Some summer programs may require an additional optional participation fee for the OSEA student to participate in any overnight or long distance excursion.

Return to top of Page

Learn About Previous OSEA Field School Programs

Who Should Consider OSEA Programs?
We are looking for highly motivated, creative, and flexible persons with a variety of skills, experience, training, and interest.

Successful participants in OSEA Ethnographic Training Programs are persons who study or have significant experience in cultural anthropology, photography, video, visual anthropology, theatre arts, staging design, installation, invisible theatre, performance art, studio art, Maya cultures, México and Latin America, Indigenous peoples, history, ethnohistory, art history, epigraphy, archeology, cultural studies, writing, journalism, tourism, museum studies, ESL, multicultural education, critical pedagogy, anthropology of education and the anthropology of art, medical anthropology.

Our programs are appropriate for undergraduate and graduate students of all levels as well as persons who have just completed a degree and seek additional fieldwork experience and training before continuing on to a graduate degree program or to a professional position

Training with OSEA provides you tools, understandings & methods on which you will continue to rely long into the future

Return to top of Page

Winter Study Abroad Program (2005)

MIRA - Multimedia Interdisciplinary Research in Anthropology

Spring Writer’s Workshop (2004)
The Ethnography Writer’s Workshop is not a fieldwork based program. The Workshop is an intensive period of writing on one’s own projects within an atmosphere of collaborative support, constructive commentary, intellectual focus created by the OSEA staff and the other participants who are similarly engaged in their own writing. The Workshop is ideal for any culture-focused writer seeking to complete a journal article, revise a book, write a dissertation or thesis, or prepare a research proposal or report.

selection of comments from participants

Visitors to OSEA, starting December 2, 2008
Return to top of Page