I can officially say I survived my first day of work at the CSER! My workday began at the Buswell's Hotel in the city center, where I helped out at a Social Care conference with another student, Roseanne, who just graduated from DCU. You're all probably wondering what Social Care actually means. In Ireland, they use the term to define it as the profession where people work in partnership with those who experience marginalization or disadvantage or who have special needs. For example, Social Care Workers might work with children in residential care, people with learning or physical disabilities, people who are homeless, people with alcohol/drug dependency problems, families in the community, older people, or others who need support.
Students interested in pursuing a degree in Social Care typically take classes in sociology, psychology, social administration and policy, law, art, communication skills, and research methods. I found one of the most interesting aspects of attaining a social care degree to be the work practice placements, where students gain experience by working directly with organizations that fit their interests. Roseanne told me that she was placed with different sites every year during her undergraduate career, and that she learned the most from the opportunity to work directly with the users of the services. It sounds to me like the work placements are what we call internships, but since they are implemented into the curriculum as part of a requirement for a degree in the field, students might take them more seriously than we do in the States.
Anyways, back to my day. When I first arrived at Buswell's, Roseanne and I were given a list of name tags to distribute to the guests attending the conference. Here's where my title kicks in. Like I said in a previous post, the spelling in Ireland differs dramatically from how we spell words in the States. Siobhan=Shivon? Smithwick's=Smittick's? I don't understand! So while handing out name-tags may at first come across as an easy task, think again. After factoring in some thick Irish accents, wacky spelling, and swarms of people coming to us all at once, you can only imagine my difficulty keeping up with the crowds while trying to figure out the pronunciation of the names. I had to ask a few people to repeat their names a few times thinking that this would solve my problem, but it seemed the accents got thicker and the pronunciation quicker (I didn't really mean to rhyme that). "Oh na na, what's your name, what's your name, what's your name?" However, by the end, I started to get more comfortable, peel those stickers off faster, and tune out all background noise so that I didn't offend anyone by giving them the wrong name. I was even able to listen to some of the conference after everyone had arrived, and it was easy to see how dedicated and passionate everyone who spoke was about Social Care in Ireland.
After the conference ended, I attempted to walk back to my internship site, which I was told was about a 25 minute walk. Unfortunately, after trying to find my way and asking strangers around me where to go, I got lost (no surprise there), so I took a taxi back to the Dublin Institute of Technology. I took the elevator up to the "Penthouse," what they call the fourth floor. I knocked on Siobhan's door, and she led me to my office and gave me a key. I share the space three days a week with another co-worker, and the other two days I have the room to myself.
Siobhan then gave me two heavy binders to read describing the intervention that the CSER is currently working on. Pre-school students participating in the intervention are from Tallaght West, a disadvantaged area in Ireland. The goal is to get the children ready for the transition to school, reduce their health problems early on, strengthen their participation in school, and help them feel safe and happy in their community. The Early Childhood Care and Education intervention focuses on the child, the child's family, and the child's environment. There is also a 6 week Parents Plus Community Course (PPCC), which aims to teach parents how to positively interact with their children, promote learning and confidence in their children, and reduce their children's behavioral problems. By the end of the day, I learned everything, and I mean everything, about this intervention (I probably read 200 or so pages of text).
As I was reading about early childhood research, such as past interventions that proved successful, I realized that this internship fits my interests perfectly. Now that I know what the ECCE is all about, I look forward to analyzing and understanding the results of the intervention. I joined the DIT at the most exciting time since the data is already collected at every phase of the project and data entry is currently underway. This means I'll probably get the opportunity to see how effective the intervention really is. Although I noticed that the intervention was rather costly to implement (based on the ratio of students to teachers) and might cause future problems for its sustainability, I still can't wait to learn all I can in these next weeks to come... and hopefully see positive results from this particular intervention and from my internship experience as a whole.
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