(1/16/08) Job Opportunity

Tufts University will be hosting an information session for Wediko
Children's Services' NH Summer Program. The New Hampshire Summer
Program is a residential treatment program for 150 boys and girls ages
7-18 with serious emotional and behavioral disorders (SED). Please
come to Dowling Hall, Room 745A on Tuesday, January 20th at 5:30pm to
learn more about their paid summer internship opportunities. Below is
a description of the NH Summer Program internship positions.

Job Descriptions:

Residential Counselors: As a part of a clinical team, work directly
with a group of 8-10 children or adolescents with serious emotional
and behavioral disorders (SED).

Special Education Assistants: Plan and implement active, learner-
centered language arts, math, and science curricula. When not
fulfilling the duties related to the classroom, Special Education
Assistants join Residential Counselors in supervising a group of 8-10
children with SED.

Therapeutic Activity Assistants: Specialized staff with training in
aquatics, athletics, and visual & performing arts, or other areas,
create and implement active, learner-centered curricula. Activity
Assistants, when not fulfilling the duties related to their
activities, join Residential Counselors in supervising a group of 8-10
children with SED.

Supervision and training are provided throughout the program by
clinical psychologists, social workers, special education
professionals, and licensed nurses.

Qualifications: Students must have completed at least two years of
college to meet and master the job demands of a direct care position.
Other positions require relevant credentials. The desire and ability
to work long hours on a staff team helping troubled children, at times
under stressful conditions is also required. Previous experience with
children or adolescents is desirable, but is not a prerequisite.
Similarly, relevant course work is helpful, but personal qualities are
even more important - such as the ability to work hard, the capacity
for working on a team, and the ability to use constructive feedback.
The ability to meet the physical demands of a rugged 450-acre campus
is also required.

Job dates: June 27 - August 23. All staff participate in lectures and
case conferences during two weeks of orientation - one week before the
children arrive, and one week after the children leave.

Benefits: Positions are paid, and include 750 hours of supervised
therapeutic experience and training, room & board, and an AmeriCorps
Educational Voucher worth $1,250 may be awarded to U.S. Citizens. All
staff receive five days off during the 45-day session.

We do not have a set application deadline. Hiring decisions are made
on a rolling basis, but send in your materials as soon as possible.
Please email tbeckum@wediko.org for more information and application.

Tiffany Beckum

Wediko Children's Services

Summer Program Administrative Coordinator

tbeckum@wediko.org

(617) 292-9200

(1/16/08) Job Opportunity

Dear Students,

I am looking to hire a student to provide support for two writing
projects by conducting literature searches, summaries and reviews.
The hours would range from 10-20 hours/week depending on the need,
until the projects are completed. Both projects need staffing
immediately.

Please contact me if you are interested in being considered for the
position.

Ellen

(01/14/08) Teaching opp at local schools

Great opportunity to enrich stardards-based classroom lessons with a
focus on local issues:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Maple Syrup Lessons in Somerville Schools: Tufts students team up
with community members to teach a 6- week series of lessons on the
history, science, and cultural tradition of Maple Syrup to K- 3rd
grade classes in the Somerville Public Schools. The series ends with
an exciting field trip to the Somerville Community Growing Center for
a day of fun, outdoor activities, tastings, and to watch our
Somerville Maple Sap boil down to syrup!

Flexibility during the day is helpful-- we will take many things into
account in planning schedules with teachers and classrooms. Training
provided. Must be able to commit to help teach at least one 50-minute
class a week for 6 weeks. Great opportunity for someone who enjoys
working with students, is enthusiastic, and comfortable in a classroom
setting.

Program Dates: end of January- mid March.
Contact Aviva, aviva.asher@gmail.com
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

(01/11/08) MA-Applied Internship available this semester

There is an excellent research internship available this semester
(spring) working on a study at Boston Medical Center. This could be a
capstone internship or a graduate level community field placement (CD
199). The study examines early identification of developmental delays
in young children and commuinicating screening results to families. An
MA student who graduated last spring is the project coordinator, and
you would work under the direction of the P.I. The position would
include one or more of the following: qualitative coding of focus
group data; exploring data about parent self-efficacy and satisfaction
during well-child visits to the pediatrician; help collect data in the
clinic for a pilot study; researching and writing a lit review about
developmental screening. This internship would provide excellent child
development and research experience.
If interested, please email me (martha.pott@tufts.edu).
Martha

(01/06/08) Research Assistantship Opportunity

Prof. Marina Bers is looking for a MA or PhD student with interest and
expertise in research in early childhood education (with a special
focus on research methodologies and evaluation in early childhood
development) to work as a Research Assistant (RA) for an NSF grant
that looks at the role of tangible computer programming in helping
young children learn. This is an interdisciplinary project with the
Computer Science department at Tufts.

The student will commit to a two year RA that will result in either a
Masters 's thesis or a qualifying paper (in the case of a doctoral
student) and will receive a stipend based on the current departmental
rate and his/her experience. He or she will collaborate closely with
students in the Computer Science department and will attend the weekly
DevTech research seminar. No previous knowledge of computer
programming or robotics is needed. However, the student needs to be
willing to learn. Experience conducting literature reviews and working
with Kindergarten-aged children is a plus.

Please send a CV and a couple of paragraphs about your interest in
working as an RA in the DevTech group (http://ase.tufts.edu/devtech/),
and more specifically about your interest in this particular project
to marina.bers@tufts.edu. Project summary is bellow.
Project Summary
This is a challenging time for early childhood education (K-2). On the
one hand, there are steeped up federally-mandated academic demands and
a growing concern to respect children's developmental stages. On the
other hand, there has not been yet a profound re-examination of the
content, in particular in the area of technology, that young children
are able to learn, nor do we have research-based evidence to evaluate
children's developmental possibilities with innovative technologies.
However, in order to advance the technological fluency of our nation's
youth, we need to start in the early years. This project proposes that
when given age-appropriate technologies, young children can actively
engage in computer programming and robotics activities in a way that
is consistent with developmentally appropriate practice. In
particular, it proposes the creation of novel human-computer
interaction techniques to support learning with technology in early
elementary school, with a focus on kindergarten. This technology will
allow us to gather research-based evidence regarding the
intellectually powerful ideas that young children are able to
understand, and build-upon, before reaching what Piaget called the
operational stage. In turn, this will allow us to revisit our
developmental assumptions. At the heart of this proposal is the claim
that, for a variety of reasons, modern graphical user interfaces (GUI)
are ill-suited for use in early elementary school classrooms,
especially for computer programming activities. Thus, this project
will focus on two aspects: 1) It will build on emerging tangible user
interface (TUI) technology to create a tangible programming language
for young children to control a robotic artifact. In short, rather
than using a mouse or keyboard to write programs to control robots,
children will instead construct programs by connecting "smart" wooden
blocks shaped like jigsaw puzzle pieces; 2) It will integrate
inexpensive building materials such as recyclables, with the use of
select robotic parts, such as wheel and motors that give functionality
and movement. Current robotic construction kits utilize materials such
as LEGO, which can be very expensive and challenging to use for young
children with small hands. Our approach creates a unique opportunity
to separate the intellectual act of computer programming and building
in the physical world, from the confounding factor of modern GUIs and
complex mechanical constructions. And, in turn, provides a means to
build a better understanding of developmental capabilities of young
children with respect to computer programming.
The project team includes experts from the fields of child
development, learning technologies, computer science, and human-
computer interaction from Tufts Unversity. It has an extensive
trajectory in engineering-base educational research through robotics.
Over the course of three years, the project will build on existing
research to develop novel technology and a complementary kindergarten
robotics-based curriculum , as well as a research protocol and robotic-
based experimental tasks that will enable us to carefully study
children's learning. The project will evaluate the effectiveness of
both the technology and the curriculum in kindergarten classrooms by
using the experimental tasks as well as ethnographic methods.
Intellectual Merit
The intellectual merit of this project resides in its potential
contributions to the fields of child development, early childhood
education, and human-computer interaction. From the point of view of
human-computer interaction, the merit of this project lies in the
novelty of the proposed interaction technique as well as the proposed
formal design process and evaluation. From the point of view of child
development and early childhood education, this project proposes to
take an unprecedented look at what young children can accomplish with
technology when given tools that are truly age-appropriate. The
project also proposes a novel methodology for studying young
children's thinking when engaging in programming and robotics.

(01/06/08) Research Assistantship Opportunity

Dear Grad Students:

A wonderful paid research assistantship is available to a student
interested in early learning. Marina Bers has a two-year fellowship
on her NSF grant that is crying out for an Eliot-Pearson graduate
student! Marina can go elsewhere in the University to find a student,
but really wants someone with developmental interests and background.
She is working right at the cutting edge, at the intersections of
child development, early childhood education, and human-computer
interaction. See below for a description of the opportunity in more
detail. This is a great opportunity, so don't miss it! If you want
more information about the possibilities it includes, do set up a
meeting with Marina.

Mon Cochran
Interim Director, ECE Program

(1/5/09) After School Program in need of help

To all Child Development Graduate Students:

My name is Leigh Cooper and I am running an after-school program for
children ages 5-11 at the Claredon Hills public housing development.
The development is located right off campus on route 16 and we provide
homework help and run educational activities twice a week from 3-5
p.m. Our goal is to create a self-sustaining program within their
community to give children a safe and productive place to go after
school, especially because a large majority of their parents work. Our
program just started last semester at Claredon Hills and this coming
semester will be joining forces with a similar group based in the
Mystic Valley Learning Center to share volunteers and knowledge about
what has been successful with the children. What we are looking for is
one or two graduate students to volunteer with the program once or
twice a week for a few hours to give feedback on how the program is
running and what it could use and to aid us in properly disciplining
the children. This is a great!
opportunity to get some field experience and we could really use the
expertise of those more formally educated in child development.
Unfortunately at this point in the programs development I don't think
I can arrange to have this offered for any type of official course
credit but eventually once the program is more established I will
contact the head of the department to try and arrange it. Our program
should begin again in early February and while the days of the week
the program will be running are to be established, they will most
likely be Mondays and Thursdays.

If you have any interest please contact me at Leigh.Cooper@tufts.edu

Thank you and I hope you all had a wonderful holiday and new years!
Leigh