Talking is Teaching

By Abbie Thompson, Department of Psychology

In this article Abbie Thompson (Psychology) describes how students in her service-learning courses support new mothers in Porter County to teach our youngest learners: babies and young children.

The name says it all. Talking is teaching as many of us faculty know. We share nuggets of our knowledge with our students through talking. While this may seem natural to us, this is not natural or common knowledge for everyone.  This knowledge is especially important for parents and caregivers of our youngest learners: babies and young children. 

We know that improving children’s lives in their first three years has a big pay off, both literally in money and figuratively in child development. This is what sparked the creation of  First Things First (FTF) by the Porter County Community Foundation. The goal of this collective is to support Porter County families, mainly from prenatal to age 3, with the wealth of amazing resources that the community already has. 

In spring 2021 FTF  launched the “Year of the Baby.” They began with the Nesting Project, a community research project designed to understand the lived experiences of moms-to-be in Porter County and then follow up with them 3 and 6 months after birth. This is where my experience with FTF began. 

In 2020 Dr. Eisenhauer, the Executive Director of FTF and a former faculty member at Purdue Northwest, contacted me about teaching a service-learning course with them. I was in my third year at VU and did not know much about service-learning at the time. But with the support of my department and the guidance of Dr. Eisenhauer, I took the opportunity. My first course focused on assisting the Nesting Project. Students in the class discussed various project ideas with Dr. Eisenhauer. We settled on creating a data management system that was used in the collection of data for the Nesting Project. 

More recently, my service-learning class has focused on creating videos for the Talking is Teaching campaign.  This program focuses on meeting parents and caregivers where they already are with their young children (birth to 5 years) and pushing the message that talking to children is teaching. One of the most impactful things that caregivers can do is just to talk to children all the time, even about the simplest things, like describing what they are doing during a diaper change or as they pick out food at the grocery store.  The campaign also promotes singing and reading. (Anyone can work with the campaign to become a Trusted Messenger, to share the message that talking is teaching.) 

My students have been creating videos to show caregivers how they can easily incorporate talking, reading, and singing into their everyday lives.  The course does not require any prior experience in making videos.  Instead, we learn together as a class and use the tools available to us, ranging from YouTube how-to videos, to the One-Button Studio in the library, to the students’ own phones. Some students in the course have no psychology or child development background. So we also work together to learn about child development. 

I often tell the students in the class that my role is to serve as a navigator for them. When they get off course, I ask questions that help guide them to potential solutions.  But it is their skills, their learning, and their interests that are going to get them there.  

I now know that you can incorporate service-learning into an existing course. Even a single class session with service-learning can be impactful for students. If you are interested, there are a number of faculty on campus who have experience incorporating service-learning into existing courses and creating courses fully around it. [EDITOR’S NOTE: You can contact CITAL for a list.] 

As a final note, I hope you will consider jumping into new experiences that you may not have a lot of background in.  I am incredibly grateful that I took the leap into service-learning; it has enriched my knowledge and the experiences of our students.