2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engagement in Practice: Maximizing the Impact of Service-learning Activities Through Collaboration with K–12 Educators

Presented at Community Engagement Division 2 - Engagement in Practice Lightning Round: Equitable Engagement and Transformative Education

A team at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) has been working with local schools and community partners to deliver service-learning STEM activities for K–12 students since 2020. These activities were developed by graduate students in engineering with guidance from engineering faculty members, an outreach specialist, and an education specialist. It has been a challenge to interact with K–12 educators as part of the development process, largely due to educators’ reluctance of taking on more work on top of their already heavy workload during the regular school year. To address this issue, the team offered a paid summer workshop to engage them to provide feedback on the current process of developing and delivering service-learning activities. More than twenty-five educators applied after recruitment emails were sent to local school district contacts. In July 2022, a one-day workshop was held at UIUC with a group of fifteen K–12 educators from twelve different local schools, ranging from pre-K to high school. After the initial introduction, workshop participants were divided into five groups based on their teaching role and grade level. A human-centered design approach was then used to guide a series of group activities, which focused mainly on connecting all stakeholders to create better support between service-learning project developers (university students) and receivers (K–12 students). Lessons learned from the summer workshop include: (1) having a long-term (3–5 years) commitment for partnership between local schools and UIUC is highly desired and (2) having university students conduct observations at K–12 classrooms before starting the service-learning project would build trust and mutual understanding between the two sides. For the next steps, the team started classroom observations with three workshop participants during the current academic year and plans to engage more units within the university to ensure a lasting service-learning partnership with local schools.

Authors

Prof. Yuting W. Chen University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign [biography]

Dr. Yuting W. Chen received the B.S. degree from University of Illinois 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 in Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her current interests include recruitment and retention of under-served students in STEM, professional development for graduate students, curriculum innovation in computing, and service-learning.
Prof. Blake Everett Johnson University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign [biography]

Dr. Blake Everett Johnson is a Teaching Assistant Professor and instructional laboratory manager in the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include experimental fluid mechanics, measurement science, engineering education, engineering leadership, and professional identity development.
Mr. Saadeddine Shehab University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign [biography]

I am currently the Associate Director of Assessment and Research team at the Siebel Center for Design (SCD) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I work with a group of wonderful and talented people at SCD’s Assessment and Research Laboratory to conduct research that informs and evaluates our practice of teaching and learning human-centered design in formal and informal learning environments.

My Research focuses on studying students’ collaborative problem solving processes and the role of the teacher in facilitating these processes in STEM classrooms.
Dr. Marcia Pool http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2813-4217 University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign [biography]

Dr. Marcia (“Marci”) 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, has served for sixteen years as teaching faculty/staff in biomedical/bioengineering and nine years in departmental/institute educational administration, and is an ABET program evaluator for Bioengineering/Biomedical Engineering. 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, undergraduate students, and predoctoral (graduate students) 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 student participants.

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