Dr. Chris Boyatzis is a professor of Psychology who focuses on Children’s and Developmental Psychology. At Bucknell, Boyatzis teaches two Community-Engaged Learning Courses: PSYC207- Developmental Psychology and PSYC320- Children’s Studies. Outside of his coursework, Boyatzis is a large proponent of civic engagement through his directorship of the Bucknell in Denmark summer program and his connection of students with Camp Koala: a camp for children experiencing death or grief. 

PSYC320 is a Psychology seminar in which students choose from a list of community partners for field placements where they are able to work hands-on directly with children, including Geisinger, Clear Vision Residential Services, and Ashler Manor. While the field component is critically important to the course, reflection is also a large component of the experience and the learning process, which is done through journaling. Boyatzis will also ask students to email him an anecdote from the week that he will then discuss with the class. In their final paper, students are asked to incorporate their own experiences from their field placements and put things in a new perspective now that they have been through the whole course. 

“You create structures for students to have experiences, but you need some structures also for them to reflect and discuss and get feedback, so that when they move ahead in that experiential developmental cycle, they are a more mature, smarter worker with children or whatever field… The academic piece to integrate the civic engagement work with the academic portion is really crucial,” said Boyatzis. 

One former student, Bethany Dirlam ‘14, spoke about the value of the journaling and being able to look back at where she was when she started the course versus at the time she finished.

“I had written about how, when I intended to go into that practicum setting, my biggest goal was to make a difference in the lives of those kids. But in hindsight, reflecting on the course, it was my final journal entry– I had written that they had made so much more of an impact on me than I had probably made on them. While I think they had a lot of fun playing with me, it was just such a valuable opportunity to really watch them and think about the way that they were doing things in context to what we were learning about in the course,” Dirlam said.

While Boyatzis views the community engagement portion to be central to PSYC320, he describes PSYC207 as a “one-eared Mickey Mouse”. Students in the class are required to spend an hour per week at the Sunflower Childcare Center, but the incorporation of this co-curricular engagement in the classroom is slightly lighter. Boyatzis will occasionally open the class with a check-in about how work at Sunflower is going. Additionally, in each unit, students have to do formal observation papers based on their experiences at Sunflower, whether the subject matter be language development, social skills, gender, etc. 

To build community partnerships, Boyatzis worked with the Office of Civic Engagement and used their database of community partners to connect with organizations already interested in working with Bucknell. Boyatzis also did some of the groundwork of finding organizations to work with simply by talking to people in the community. 

Having started to develop these classes, Boyatzis noted benefits for both community partners and participating students. According to Boyatzis, many child-serving facilities are understaffed, so having student volunteers helps individual children get more attention. “They’re getting some talent and a good heart in my students,” said Boyatzis, and those same students are getting good exposure to potential career paths and opportunities to explore their interests in the real world. With PSYC 320 being a senior seminar course, many students came in with set career plans but by the end of the semester, left with completely new perspectives, and in some cases, different ideas of their identities and what they wanted to do with their lives. 

Dirlam was one such student, and now works as a teacher at a forest school, which is an entirely outdoor early childhood program (ages 3-6), focusing on providing children with social/emotional skills, spiritual development, cognitive skills, and motor skills. 

“One of my big takeaways from the course is that, as someone who works with children, we have a responsibility to meet those children where they are and to not expect them to fit what we think they should be,” said Dirlam, adding “But just to meet them where they are, and to provide them the support for where they want to go or where they need to go… I think that the skills that I learned and a lot of the topics I discussed in Professor Boyatzis’ Children’s Studies course, are hugely applicable to my work with children now. Everyday I try to meet the children where they are and give them the support they need to continue to grow. Every child, especially because we have a mixed age group, is at a different place. And so what one child can do might not be the same as what another can do.”

Since beginning to teach these community engaged classes and discovering how beneficial they are for him, his students, and the local community, Boyatzis realized that he would never go back to teaching without it. He stressed the importance of classes, like PSYC 320 and PSYC207, that allow students to gain a valuable learning experience by getting directly involved with community organizations. 

Incorporating a community engaged element into classes “adds a level of richness and reality to a course, that I think actually is what gives the course perhaps its most valuable feature. Because what happens in college classes, you know, between four walls… is one thing, but when students go out into the world, you know, it’s another thing altogether,” said Boyatzis. “If we’re bringing students into the community, whether the community is a field or a stream, or a children’s hospital, we’re trying to develop and we’re trying to change hearts and minds…to get students to care more about their environment, whether it’s the human environment, like in my case, children, or the natural environment. We’re trying to cultivate a sense of agency in students.”