A human services worker’s job is often out of the office and in the field—a community, a home, a school—where the clients live and build relationships. For human services students, getting out in the field and working with people brings a level of understanding that just cannot be taught in the classroom. Students can benefit greatly from exposure to the problems they will soon be asked to solve.
Dr. Lauren Jacobson, senior instructor in human development and family studies at Penn State Altoona, knows the rewards of getting students into a real-life situation. Once a week during each semester, students in her HDFS 311: Introduction to Intervention class visit an afterschool program conducted by the Gloria Gates Memorial Foundation in Altoona to work with school children from low-income families. As a result of their involvement, Jacobson says, “my students think about human services in a much more socially, emotionally, and psychologically healthy way. For a lot of them it’s the first time they’ve been pushed out of the classroom.”
The program “started as part of a grant through the Department of Housing and Urban Development,” Jacobson explains. For the first four or five weeks students attend the children’s afterschool program. While they help the children with their homework, they “are supposed to be actively engaged with these kids. They have to work with them well enough to identify a growth area that would benefit the children.” Once the students get to know the children, it’s time to “work together as a group to create workshops focused on a topic such as fitness, nutrition, teamwork that will help the children.”
One of the issues the college students face when developing a workshop is the age range of the children. “We’re interested in developmental appropriateness: how do you deal with a five-year-old or a ten-year-old?” Jacobson asks. “With five-year-olds you can’t ask them to respond to pencil and paper activities; they may not be able to read. This forces my students to move out of the traditional model of teaching to ‘what kind of game can you introduce to explore nutrition?’.“
Another issue for the students is learning about a way of life they have not yet been exposed to. Jacobson explains: “They see children residing in low-income residential neighborhoods where the only influences in their neighborhoods are from people with low-income experiences. They are not exposed to variability in education, work, etc.,” as the college students most likely were. “And there’s a different level of engagement on the parents’ part. My students may have ‘helicopter parents’. But for the children they meet, there’s a different level of understanding of what it means to be a parent. Everybody wants the best for their kids but they just get there in different ways. My students have to confront their own values and be accepting of the different values of others.”
Kaylee Knouse, a junior majoring in elementary education, speaks enthusiastically about her time with the children at the Gates Foundation. She and fellow students Dakota Deneen and Rachel Evans put together five weeks of workshop programs. Week 1 was titled “It’s a Struggle to Juggle a Well-Balanced Diet.” Knouse says, “Low-income kids aren’t always familiar with what foods are good to eat. So we brought in foods they could literally juggle. We had a group discussion about what was easy to juggle.” The children also did a worksheet that involved “coloring healt
hy foods and circling foods that were bad.” The second and third weeks focused on the Food Guide Pyramid and putting together a recipe book the children could work on with their parents.
One of the biggest successes was “Fruit Factor,” says Deneen, a fifth-year nursing senior. “We cut up fruit into really small pieces—strawberries, apples, oranges, kiwis, mangoes. We had the kids sit in front in blindfolds. One by one we put it in their hand and told them to taste it and describe it.” They were also asked questions, such as “Is it soft? Hard? Sour? Sweet?” The children were a little hesitant at first, she says. “An older kid went first; she was not so intimidated. She liked them all. By the end of it all the kids were really up close to the girl trying the food. And they didn’t always get it right. It was awesome how involved they wanted to be in that activity.”
The final week was “Healthy Jeopardy,” with true/false questions. “The older kids enjoyed this,” Knouse says. “They had competitiveness, but they also had to use teamwork to make it successful.” She recognized that it’s not so easy working across ages. “It was challenging to implement activities that they could all enjoy.”
This course was the first time Deneen had regular exposure to children. “I didn’t have much experience at all beyond babysitting, so it was an interesting experience for me. I had taken an HDFS [human development and family services] class where we mentored older adults. We weren’t really mentors for the kids and they really looked up to us. You wanted to do a good job because they knew you were trying to teach them something and they appreciated it.” The students had concerns about the children’s reactions, but “most of them were always really excited to be a part of our program. It was a real blast.”
In the end, Jacobson says, her students had to measure whether the workshops were effective and measure the impact on the children. “The point of the exercise is to learn about prevention over intervention, as well as the context of development and how powerful that is. It’s not nature or nurture, it’s nature and nurture.”
—Therese Boyd, ’79