MURFREESBORO — Why
wait until middle school or high school to drive home the connection between
education and life after school to young people?
MTSU and Murfreesboro City Schools say that point cannot be
made early enough.
That’s the
mission of the Collaborative Learning and Leadership Institute, a partnership between MTSU and
Murfreesboro City Schools designed to help young children make a connection
between what they are learning in school and what that education will mean to
their adult lives.
“By the time children are 8, they
already have an idea of what they want to do,” said Gilbert, a former MTSU
professor. “By the time they leave us in sixth grade, it may be too late
because, in their minds, they already have a concept of hope or a concept of
despair.”
Housed at Mitchell-Neilson Elementary
School, the institute promotes interaction between college students and
youngsters whose dreams are not yet fully formed and helps the kids understand
what life can be like when school is over.
Those college students come from the
College of Behavioral and Health Sciences, which houses the “helping”
disciplines of criminal justice, health and human performance, human sciences,
nursing, psychology and social work.
An example of the institute in action
is the health literacy project guided by Drs. Catherine Crooks and Stuart
Bernstein of the Department of Psychology.
Fueled by an $8,000 grant from the
Dollar General Literacy Foundation, Crooks, Bernstein and their students work
with kids and their parents to help them understand various health issues, such
as when to go to the doctor and when to go to the emergency room.
“We have examples of deaths here in
Rutherford County because people have either taken medication incorrectly or
couldn’t read the labels,” said Bea Perdue, the college’s development director.
The practical applications extend
beyond health literacy. The Murfreesboro Housing Authority, St. Thomas
Rutherford Hospital’s mobile health centers and the family learning centers in
public housing complexes are also partners with the institute.
Through MTSU’s partnership with
Mitchell-Neilson, elementary students can gain the kind of inspiration that can
propel them into an academic life they never figured they could live.
“There are so many kids in the
Murfreesboro city schools who don’t even know there’s a college in town,” said
Dr. Harold Whiteside, dean of the College of Behavioral and Health Sciences.
“So the idea of going to college is a thought that has never crossed their
minds.”
For now, the institute’s brick-and-mortar
home is a nondescript outbuilding between the two classroom buildings on the
Mitchell-Neilson campus. Educators do their planning in one room; students do
their learning in the other.
However, Whiteside and Gilbert’s vision
for the institute lies far beyond its terrestrial home. They see potential for
future activities that can change a bleak reality for an at-risk population of
students in a nation where a child drops out of school every nine to 16 seconds.
Meanwhile, MTSU students benefit from interacting
with people from cultures they had not encountered previously and from seeing
the effectiveness of their work and their research.
“I think it’ll change the way they look
at their coursework, and I think it’ll change the way we look at what we need to
be doing as practitioners,” Gilbert said.
A video about Mitchell-Neilson’s
partnership with the College of Behavioral and Health Sciences may be viewed at
http://youtu.be/0U6RxN5NJp0/
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