Youth Development and Social Justice Capstone Seminar

Catalog description

This course will immerse students in theories, historical contexts, and practices of structural oppressions that influence youth development, and responses to them through youth empowerment, democratic action, and popular education in communities through study, reflection and, most importantly, on-site partnership field placement with an urban youth worker or agency, such as in a school or community organization. Specifically, you will work with various community-based organizations in partnerships set up by the Penn State Faculty that are local exemplars of democratic action with and for youth development, working closely with professionals affiliated with those programs to support their work and learn from them. HDFS 400 is a community engaged and culture of support course. Community engagement, also called service learning, is a form of reciprocal experiential education wherein students learn through the collaborative process of meeting authentic community needs. High quality community engagement also attempts to affect real, material social conditions; to authentically integrate the work done to meet community needs with the curriculum/course through continuous, critical reflexive and reflective inquiry; and to be a system of praxis (theory - practice) where the inquiry then informs the work participants do, participants' self-concepts, and the practices of the community. The field, reading, in class and written work will reflect these principles