As a student in the Academic Accelerator, you’ll receive:

• The right amount of support for your academic and English-speaking needs
• A full year’s worth of college credits
• Access to courses exclusively for international students
• English-language help with words you need to know for your classes
• A mix of classes with international and U.S. students

The early childhood education program prepares students to work with children from birth through third grade. As an early childhood education major, you will spend time in classrooms at the nationally accredited on-campus child development center and in many schools throughout the Columbia area.

You will learn key strategies for working effectively with diverse populations to support children's learning, growth and development, and for working with all children's families. Through challenging and hands-on coursework, you will become adept at developing meaningful learning opportunities aligned with South Carolina learning standards and other guidelines and at assessing children's progress in mastering those standards in academically and culturally appropriate ways.

The research you will conduct through this program is the kind of work that great teachers engage in every day. The most effective teachers constantly pay attention to their teaching and to the responses of students and families. When this is formalized it becomes what is known as teacher-research, a highly valued form of study in the field of education. Thus, the research you will conduct is not merely to fulfill course requirements, but to learn practices that you will use every day as a classroom teacher: paying careful attention to children so that you can make moment-to-moment and long-term decisions about how to reach and teach them.

Early childhood educators play a critical role in the lives of young children, beginning even before kindergarten and continuing through the early elementary years. Recent research has shown that the earliest years of a child’s life provide the foundation for future health, happiness, growth, and learning. Because of this, a growing number of parents have begun introducing their young children to structured learning environments, which means that early childhood educators are in demand! Graduates of our program are highly sought as teachers in public and private elementary schools, preschool/child care settings, and in agencies or organizations that work on behalf of young children and their families.  Many of our students continue on to enroll in a master’s degree program during their first years of teaching.