This required, three-hour undergraduate course serves approximately 60 Family and Child Science majors per term, and asks each student to serve 60 hours in the community over the course of the semester

At the beginning of the semester, students choose their community placement from an array of service possibilities, making their decision after an invited panel of site supervisors comes into the classroom and describes the service opportunities available in their respective organizations.

Our department has solid relationships with these organizations. On-site agency supervisors provide supervision of students and provide feedback concerning their progress. The Community Instruction instructor regularly adds or removes potential service site offerings depending on student interest and on-going site performance. Students begin their service after two weeks of basic orientation in the classroom. Once their service begins, class time is split between brief lectures on topics that cut across service areas and opportunities for student discussion of their service experience. In addition to contact with students in class, the community instruction professor visits each of them at their service site in order to observe them and confer with their on-site supervisor.