Saltanat Childress, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, School of Social Work

Service Learning Course(s):

• Intimate Partner Violence (SOCW 2202) 

“The students learned, gained experience and critical perspective. The community partner got additional support, and got interesting, motivated people."

Dr. Saltanat Childress is an assistant professor at UTA’s School of Social Work focused on family well-being, economic empowerment, and improving the responses of criminal justice. Familiar with service learning, she previously worked with the AmeriCorps program, where she taught courses on Domestic Violence and National AmeriCorps Service which provided members with the Certificate of a Victim Advocate. She is determined to bridge the gap between academia and practice, and this determination has led her to incorporate elements of experiential learning alongside pre and post debriefing and critical reflection into her master’s level Intimate Partner Violence course.

Her favorite part of the Faculty Fellows Program has been exchanging ideas with other faculty fellows and learning from them how other disciplines incorporate service learning and community-based research in their curriculum. She believes service learning is important because of its experiential learning, compulsory critical reflection, and community-based participatory research components. She believes service learning deepens UTA’s role in the community, as it gives students something so much richer than they can get in the classroom.

Dr. Childress advises future faculty fellows to get a good community partner, start small, and prepare students before placing them in an organization.