Undergraduate students majoring in child and family development (CHFD) at a southeastern public doctoral/research university were required to complete 14 hours of service learning in a local after school program as part of the course requirements in a class titled "Youth Development." The course is a required course for majors and…

The University of Pittsburgh Office of Child Development (OCD) has practiced university-community engagement activities for 30 years. This has included hundreds of specific projects conducted with community partners, all funded by outside grants. Based on our experience, we describe some lessons learned regarding the operation of a…

Purpose: This article reports preliminary outcomes from a service-learning (SL) experience for graduate students in the Speech-Language Pathology program with incarcerated mothers who reside with their infants at a residential parenting program. We present an ecological model to serve as a framework for interpreting the impact of the experience on…

This article describes the implementation of a service-learning project, which was infused into a child development course. The project linked family child care providers, their licensing agency, and 39 preservice teachers in a joint effort to develop a parent handbook to be used by the providers in their child care businesses and to support…

Play has been globally recognized as valuable to children's learning and development (Frost et al., 2012). The value of play is acknowledged as a developmentally appropriate practice in part because it fosters cognitive, physical, emotional, and social benefits to children. Play is also known as a human right that should be protected. However, in…

The purpose of this article is to describe one teacher education program's experience using an integrated approach to provide preservice teachers with both knowledge of and experience with diverse cultures. Included are three important components within this program that strive to assist preservice teachers as they develop an understanding of…

Skills developed through qualitative research and community partnerships can be essential for developing education students' cultural competency and understandings about diverse student populations. Toward this end, we developed a qualitative "service-research" project in a teacher education course focused on child development, whereby…

In this article, we present initial findings of an exploratory-pilot research study that focuses on "service learning" as a framework to examine "real learning" and identity changes of university students participating in a community based educational activity known as "La Clase Mágica." Student's reports and…

This paper shares the survey results of students' perceptions of the benefits of their experiences with service learning. The service learning experiences were related to children and their physical growth and development and/or to children and their health education. An open-ended questionnaire was sent to 376 graduated students (representing 11…

In this article, the author describes a service learning experience that allowed university students to work with culturally and linguistically diverse children as a partial requirement for an introductory level course in Early Childhood Education. Data from the journals and case studies indicated that preservice teachers benefited from this…

A Head Start volunteer project was designed for a college-level child development course and implemented in three different sections of the class across two semesters. Overall, 70 students participated (65 females and 5 males) with assessment data collected from student volunteers and Head Start teachers and administrators. Students reported a…

The Academy for Educational Development's (AED's) work in the United States includes programs with many of the nation's major foundations on issues of education reform, parental involvement in the schools, youth development and bridging the distance between school, work, and successful university education. The projects described here cover a wide…