Behind Stanley Hall, children can be heard giggling and playing with one another, sounds you would expect from a standard daycare.
However, these aren’t the sounds of an average daycare but rather the byproduct of cutting edge research being done in the MU Child Development Lab. The CDL offers an opportunity for students to put into practice what they have learned in the classroom while working with infants and toddlers first hand.
“Our primary mission is that we are a teacher training laboratory school, and we’re associated with the Department of Human Development and Family Sciences,” CDL Director Michelle Mathews said. “So what that means is every semester we get a new group of students that want to work with children and families in some capacity.”
The lab has been used for a number of different studies, such as Availability and Use of Recorded Music in Selected Preschool Classrooms, Maternal Supervision Project and Who Cares? Assessing Young Children’s Understanding of Care and Concern in Others, according to the CDL website.
Currently, there are two projects that Mathews said she is particularly excited about.
“Right now we have [two] active research projects,” Mathews said. “We have the faculty doing research on play and are observing children’s play behaviors. We have a psychology honors student who is doing a project on children’s categorization of human qualities, looking at dolls and categorizing dolls by certain qualities. So, we work with psychology.”
These studies highlight the difference between the CDL and a community daycare.
“We’re very different from community-based programs because our teachers are university employees,” she said. “They have university benefits and paid time off, so our program differs because our teachers are highly trained and educated because we are educating the next generation of teachers and people that want to work with children. I think that comparing us to a ‘daycare’ would be like comparing apples to oranges in a way because we have such a different mission.”
The CDL does still maintain a “daycare” component. In order for children to be a part of it, parents have to apply the same as they would for any other infant or toddler school. However, this process is not always easy, especially for younger children.
“We are open to the community, and we do have a waiting list,” Matthews said. “For infants and toddlers, it’s pretty big because we only have seven infant spots and eight toddlers spots, but for preschoolers 2-and-a-half to 5, we have 60 spots. So, we currently don’t have much of a waiting list for preschoolers.”
The CDL does employ full-time teachers, as well as graduate students.
“We have 13 full-time teachers who are full-time university employees, we have three [graduate] students,” Mathews said. “I do hire students part-time that have completed our lab courses; they are like subs for us. We have an administrative assistant.”
Mendy Ditto, a teacher who graduated from MU in 1995, said she believes that the opportunities that CDL offers students provide them with serious change.
“The college students have been very professional,” Ditto said. “You’ll see them come in and use a lot of negative comments with the children because that’s how they were raised and then to see them transform by the time they’re done here to using the positive approach that we use. It’s really neat to see them grow as teachers.”
_Edited by Laura Evans | levans@themaneater.com_
