Early learning center and model project

In recent years, Nordhausen University of Applied Sciences has strongly focused its specific profile within the study area "Health and Social Services" on improving educational competencies in the early childhood sector. This has been accompanied by the establishment of a dedicated early childhood teaching center (LFS), which is intended to ensure a close link between scientific teaching, professional training and practical application. Within the framework of the LFS, students have the opportunity to put the knowledge they have acquired during their studies into practice and to reflect on it critically. In close exchange with teaching and professional staff, they learn how work processes can be designed in practice, what challenges professionals in early intervention face and what potential the field of early intervention offers within the framework of social work. Students are thus enabled to enter the practical semester and / or the profession with an extended practical knowledge. Implicit in this is the expansion of competence to critically reflect on one's own work steps and to deal more intensively with a theory-practice transfer.

More detailed information can be found in the concept paper of the early learning center.

The KFK would like to transfer the above scientific findings into modern practical concepts and test the effect of family-oriented support programs integrated into the medical-social networks in the form of a regional model project. The Nordhausen University of Applied Sciences has been accompanying processes of social space-oriented transformation for many years and has also developed its own concept for an early intervention center. This concept is now being linked with the remedial early intervention center of the old district of Osterode/Harz to form a new overall concept of an interdisciplinary teaching early intervention center (LFS) and has been tested since November 2020, in cooperation with the local early intervention center and the Early Help Network. The focus is primarily on improving early detection by reducing access thresholds. The target group is children with suspected developmental risks and their caregivers who live in the district of Osterode and have not yet started school.

Within the framework of the model project, scientific monitoring is ensured, which processes, critically reflects and publishes the effectiveness of the assistance. The project is also supported by a research group of the Medical School Hamburg, under the direction of Prof. Dr. phil. Liane Simon, Professor of Transdisciplinary Early Intervention at the Campus Arts and Social Change. In order to obtain valid and resilient material, a minimum period of three years is planned with the option of an extension for a further two years.

Detailed information on the model project can be found below.