Outreach: Learning by serving
Clinical associate professor Dave Chiesa has no shortage of stories about the service-learning course he developed to support linguistically diverse youth.
There’s the student who returned semester after semester to support the same child’s literacy development, and another who carried what she learned into her Fulbright teaching experiences in Taiwan and Turkey. Yet another student developed an AI-assisted framework to help students learn and practice pragmatics through chat-based interactions, later presenting her work to over 1,000 teachers in Uzbekistan.
While his students’ career paths have branched in different directions, their stories at the University of Georgia all share a common thread: Bay Creek Elementary School in Walton County.
“I have UGA tutors who are from all over the University, and some of them have never taught in their life,” said Chiesa, who teaches in the Department of Language and Literacy Education. “It’s great because through this course, we get to serve people from all over the world. We’re also supporting those who have special needs, including children with autism and dyslexia.”