Painless Integration of Nutrition Education and Core Curriculum Requirements: A Student Lead Service Learning Project

Outlaw, Kerri L

Monday, 18 November 2013

Kerri L Outlaw, CNS, RN
School of Nursing, Troy University, Troy, AL

Learning Objective 1: The learner will be able to identify 2 ways to increase effective collaboration among professionals in the community by the end of the presentation

Learning Objective 2: The learner will be able to design similiar SLP to be completed within their own communities.

Service learning is a unique teaching strategy in that the student learns through hands-on, relevant teaching projects. This article examines the concept of service learning in nursing practice and education to improve health behaviors in school children. Nursing students conducted a service learning project at local elementary school where the incidence of pediatric overweight is greater than 60%. This article describes the outcomes of that project.

Community Health nursing students created nutrition-based lesson plans that included key curriculum requests provided by the faculty. Teachers reported increased confidence in their ability to conduct thee lessons after observing the nursing students teach the children in their classrooms. This project demonstrates how service learning can increase the sustainability of school-based interventions and have been included in the prospectus for future Community Health nursing classes. Conclusion: Service learning fosters collaboration between community organizations, scholarship and sustainability of school-based interventions to improve health behaviors of children.

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