H210V Course Description

In this 6-week module, we will seek to understand and improve the quality of human interactions across a wide range of developmental contexts (both cultural and institutional), from orphanages to classrooms and from early childhood to youth development. The driving question is: How do we encourage, enhance, and empower the human relationships around children and youth in adversity? By learning from what ordinary people do extraordinarily well in relationship with one another in simple, everyday moments, we can nurture intuition into intention, grow communities of practice, and plant seeds for sustainable systems change. The course weaves together the "understanding" and "applying" threads. Part of the course will focus on applying developmental theories to examine actual practices (on video) in authentic field settings of human development. Part of the course will focus on how we can develop and use a relationship-focused theory of change to improve practices, programs, and policies. The contexts chosen for this module have a common focus on children experiencing adversity in both US-based and international settings.