University-Community Partnership for an After-School Education
Investigator: Deborah Lowe Vandell
Funding: UC Links
Project Description
The UCI Certificate in After-school Education (CASE) began in fall 2008. CASE is guided by a bioecological perspective to human development. As applied to after-school programming (ASP), this perspective emphasizes the importance of a good fit between the background and stage of children served and the opportunities and quality of interchanges in the program environment. To achieve a good person-stage-environment fit, education and training opportunities for program providers are deemed critical. To that end, CASE combines classroom instruction and supervised fieldwork across a sequence of courses in the Department of Education.
The goals for UCI students include developing:
- basic knowledge of child/adolescent development;
- core knowledge in theory, research, and evaluation of ASPs; and
- practical skills working with, and developing quality programming for, children and youth in ASPs
CASE maintains a partnership with seven core ASPs:
- KidWorks (Santa Ana),
- Think Together (Santa Ana Unified)
- Project Success (Newport-Mesa Unified)
- Turtle Rock Community Park (Irvine),
- UCI Extended Day Center (UCI)
- Girls Incorporated (Costa Mesa)
- Vista Verde (Irvine)
The diverse populations of young people served at these sites provide CASE students the opportunity to understand the needs of a variety of people and communities. In turn, CASE provides K-12 youth with a variety of socially and cognitively appropriate activities that include: creative writing; technology using music, art, and computers; book clubs; real world math investigations; tutoring; dance programs; cooking; sports; and multi-cultural learning.