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Engagement in Practice: Toward Building University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign's Multi-Disciplinary Service-Learning Ecosystem

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Conference

2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Minneapolis, MN

Publication Date

August 23, 2022

Start Date

June 26, 2022

End Date

June 29, 2022

Conference Session

Community Engagement Division Technical Session 3- Multi- and Inter-disciplinary, Collaboration, and Engagement in Practice

Page Count

8

DOI

10.18260/1-2--41184

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/41184

Download Count

239

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Paper Authors

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Yuting Chen University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign

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Dr. Yuting W. Chen received the B.S. degree from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2007, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2009 and 2011, all in Electrical Engineering. She is currently a Teaching Associate Professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prior to joining Illinois ECE as a faculty, she worked at IBM Systems Group in Poughkeepsie, NY in z Systems Firmware Development. Her current interests include recruitment and retention of under-represented students in STEM, K-12 outreach, integrative training for graduate teaching assistants, and curriculum innovation for introductory computing courses.

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Blake Johnson University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign

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Blake Everett Johnson is a Teaching Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, from which institution he holds degrees in Engineering Mechanics (BS 2005) and Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (MS 2007, PhD 2005). His research interests include Experimental Fluid Mechanics, Engineering Leadership, the Entrepreneurial Mindset, and pedagogies including Inquiry-Based Learning, Project-Based Learning, and Active Learning. He serves the Grainger College of Engineering at UIUC as an Entrepreneurial Mindset Fellow for the Academy of Excellence in Engineering Education.

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Marcia Pool University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign

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Marcia Pool is the Assistant Director for Education at the Cancer Center at Illinois and a Teaching Associate Professor in Bioengineering. She holds a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering and has served for thirteen years as teaching faculty/staff in bioengineering and six years in departmental/institute educational administration. She focuses on identifying and evaluating mechanisms to enhance the educational experience and develop students into engineers and researchers. Her work includes interventions to enhance training for high school students (eight week immersive, research experience), undergraduate students (capstone design, development of experimental design skills), and predoctoral and postdoctoral trainees through training programs such as NIH T32s. These programs include curricular, extracurricular, and professional and career development components with required evaluation and tracking of participants. She is also an ABET program evaluator for Bioengineering/Biomedical Engineering.

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Saadeddine Shehab University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign

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Saadeddine Shehab is currently the Head of Assessment and Research at the Siebel Center for Design (SCD) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He works with a group of undergraduate and graduate SCD scholars at SCD’s Assessment and Research Laboratory to conduct research that informs and evaluates the practice of teaching and learning human-centered design in formal and informal learning environments. His research focuses on studying students’ collaborative problem-solving processes and the role of the teacher in facilitating these processes in STEM classrooms that feature the learning of STEM through design.

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Brian Johnson University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign

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Abstract

Motivated by sympathy for the plight of K –12 educators during the early days of the pandemic, instructors of one course in University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Grainger College of Engineering saw an opportunity to help. They reached out to a local middle school with an offer to develop educational media for their science classes, which would be produced by teams of engineering students. Though the production was not of flawless quality, the recipient was pleased with the content. The idea for a multi-disciplinary Service-Learning Ecosystem was seeded.

To encourage service-learning incorporation in more engineering courses, a team comprised of faculty and specialists from engineering, education, and media is building an ecosystem that will connect university instructors (faculty and graduate teaching assistants) with local partners; provide educational and multi-media support, guided by experts in education and media; and serve the local community and beyond.

To make connections with local community partners, the team collaborated with a campus unit that oversees community service and received many leads due to the unit’s effective outreach strategies. Nevertheless, the team faced two challenges: 1) addressing the needs of each local community partner while still meeting the course learning objectives for the university instructors involved and 2) defining the needed support from education and media specialists. To overcome these challenges, the team is currently conducting a qualitative research study that aims to understand the experience of the current cohort of service-learning university GTAs (Graduate Teaching Assistants) who will generate learning modules for local schools. The findings of this study will set the stage for improving, scaling, and building the service-learning ecosystem by providing insights to understand the mutually beneficial experiences for university instructors and students, and local partners and their students.

Chen, Y., & Johnson, B., & Pool, M., & Shehab, S., & Johnson, B. (2022, August), Engagement in Practice: Toward Building University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign's Multi-Disciplinary Service-Learning Ecosystem Paper presented at 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Minneapolis, MN. 10.18260/1-2--41184

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