About the Department of Applied Human Sciences
The Department of Applied Human Sciences, with its two fields of study, Rehabilitation Psychology and Applied Childhood Sciences, offers two study programmes that are unique in their form in the German university landscape.
With the study programme Management of Child Day Care Facilities - Childhood Education, a professionally integrating and part-time study programme was conceived especially for professionally experienced educators. This degree programme is the first in Saxony-Anhalt to offer an academic degree for educators.
These courses are complemented by the Elementary Education major, which covers three important areas of social competence:
- Firstly, the maintenance and restoration of mental health with the corresponding provision of training, further training and counselling as well as practice-oriented research and model development in the field of psychotherapeutic and psychosocial care. Together with the psychosocial service providers in the region, the university staff will provide a low-threshold care offer in the Altmark region and at the same time ensure a close link between teaching, research and practical psychological or rehabilitation psychology activities.
- Secondly, the design of living environments to strengthen children's competence. This is where the multidisciplinary potential of the Applied Childhood Sciences programme comes into play, but also the specialist psychological resources of the Rehabilitation Psychology programme, insofar as they are dedicated to the topic of child development. In terms of content, the focus is on promoting children's health, implementing appropriate prevention programmes, child-related participatory planning and participation projects, projects for integrating socially conspicuous and socially weak children, researching the living conditions of children with a migration background and conceptualising appropriate regional integration projects, researching the conditions and effects of child poverty and developing countermeasures in cooperation with municipal agencies, etc.
- The third field of study, elementary education, fits in here: Currently, there is a great need in Germany for empirically validated basic knowledge on early learning and educational processes, on which the professional development of the quality of institutional education, upbringing and care of children must be based. Likewise, those politically responsible for creating the appropriate legal, financial, etc. frameworks need scientific foundations. The political decision-makers responsible for creating the appropriate legal, financial, etc. framework conditions also need scientific foundations for their decisions. Application-oriented research tailored to the needs of society must therefore take on the task of providing scientific advice on policy and practice. The professional expertise of all disciplines relevant to the practical field of early education, which is brought together in the Department of Applied Human Sciences in a way that is almost unique in Germany, offers the opportunity for an application-oriented concretisation of basic research, which both takes into account the state-specific conditions and needs in a practice-oriented way and has the potential to scientifically substantiate relevant support programmes with charisma and a model effect beyond the borders of Saxony-Anhalt. The Competence Centre for Early Education at the department is to bundle the existing expertise and cover the complex tasks for the practical field of (early) childhood education, upbringing and care by coordinating research, teaching, further training and advisory activities throughout the state.
(Photo: Bastian Ehl)