News and Spotlights
Faculty Spotlight - Brandon Youker, Ph.D.
December 01, 2020
Community-based learning is a centerpiece of education at the College of Community and Public Service. One of the best practitioners of this pedagogical model is Dr. Brandon Youker in the School of Social Work. “For nearly a decade, I’ve been championing community-based learning (CBL) at GV. CBL is a practice of connecting students with a community organization in true partnership and reciprocity, with both students and community partners benefiting. I adopted CBL as the signature pedagogy in two of my regular graduate courses (i.e., SW 679 [Program Monitoring & Evaluation] and SW660 [Grant Writing]) and one undergrad course (SW 317 [Generalist Practice I]). In these courses, students work with non-profit organizations to evaluate programs, write grants, and execute a project to positively impact the community.”
In 2019, Dr. Younker wrote, “What, how, and why? A comparative analysis of 12 goal-free evaluations” for the Journal of Multidisciplinary Evaluation (Volume 15, pages 16-29). Dr. Youker’s incorporates goal-free evaluations into his graduate class in program evaluation, which partners with Family Promise of Grand Rapids in a long-term community-based learning project. The reports by these students helped pave the way for a multimillion-dollar capital campaign to help the program grow in its mission to serve homeless children and families in Grand Rapids.
MSW student Ken Ford explains that Dr. Younker’s approach connected students like himself with the community for real-world experiences. “We again learned by doing. In his qualitative research course, students definitely learned the theory; however, the approach was unique—we learned it by conducting actual interviews from conceptualization to writing and discussing the findings. This was the first class that I actually learned based on what I performed. Incredible.”