Human Development and Family Studies faculty lead annual trips to the Reggio Children International Conference in Reggio Emilia, Italy and to Oaxaca, Mexico for a three week service learning opportunity to work with children in orphanages or shelters. Please see your program advisor for more details

This summer, Margaret Desormes and I spent time in Italy with 7 eager CMU students. We were very excited about this year's trip and the opportunities that it presented. Rather than attending  an official conference sponsored by Reggio Children (which often costs students over $1500), we instead visited exhibits of school projects, scheduled short guided tours of exhibits and ateliars for a much smaller fee, and made our own arrangements to visit nearby schools which are still open to visitirs (Cavriago, Italy). We were able to do much of these more flexible activities due to work that was accomplished during the 2012 study abroad trip in which most of the CDLL staff also participated. Along the same lines, we are working to expand our partnership with these schools and brought them gifts from the CDLL children, invited school and community leaders to a hosted dinner with our students, and discussed future possibilities for our closest partners to travel to the U.S. to visit the CDLL and work with our faculty, staff and students.

In an effort to be more transparent and to include anyone who is interested, we created a website to document and share our plans, experiences and learning. This allowed the students to share and document their learning as student researchers and allowed their friends and families to follow along and comment on our progress.

The website address is www.reggio2012.homestead.com. 

If you've shared that you would like to participate in this experience in the future, you can visit the website to share in our experiences and get a first hand look at what a wonderful experience you can have!

Cheryl Priest