2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engagement in Practice: Partnering with Honors Students to Build a Sustainable Service-Learning Ecosystem

Since 2022, an interdisciplinary team of engineering and education faculty, staff, and student researchers has co-created a Service-Learning Ecosystem connecting university students, pre-service educators, and local K-12 partners through shared goals of educational equity and mutual learning. Initially piloted within a graduate-level teaching and leadership course, the program has evolved into a campus-wide partnership model incorporating Entrepreneurial Mindset Learning (EML)—curiosity, connections, and creating value—into community-engaged teaching. It now includes undergraduate students from a campus honors program who apply coursework concepts to co-design STEM lessons with guidance from their instructor and ecosystem members. Motivated by the belief that sustainable community engagement requires reciprocal partnerships, this initiative cultivates a space for mutual learning and co-creation between the university and community partners, strengthening both pedagogical practice and community impact.

The ecosystem engages multiple stakeholders: engineering students as instructional designers and mentors, graduate researchers as workshop facilitators, undergraduate education students as teaching catalysts, faculty as content experts, and K-12 teachers as community partners providing authentic classrooms.

Each semester, 20 to 40 students voluntarily participated, demonstrating strong enthusiasm for integrating EML into lesson design. Their creativity in translating advanced, disciplined, specific STEM knowledge into accessible, engaging lessons fostered the construction of their teaching knowledge, attitudes, and values, while K-12 learners benefited from near-peer mentorship and early exposure to STEM. Maintaining participation through all stages, from workshop attendance to final classroom delivery, remains an ongoing challenge.

Moving forward, the research team will conduct a survey-based evaluation to understand the ecosystem’s educational effectiveness. Pre- and post-surveys with open-ended questions will capture engineering students’ reflections on learning experiences. In contrast, instructor and community partner interviews will explore perceived student growth, mutual benefits of the ecosystem, and barriers to engagement. These data will guide the refinement of interactive programs.

Authors

Prof. Blake Everett Johnson University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign [biography]

Dr. Blake Everett Johnson is a Teaching Associate 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.
Prof. Yuting W. Chen http://orcid.org/0009-0002-7513-9712 University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign [biography]

Dr. Yuting W. Chen is a Teaching Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she also leads the Women in Engineering program as the Director. She earned her B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2007 and her M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2009 and 2011, respectively. Her current interests include recruitment and retention of under-represented students in STEM, professional development for graduate students, and curriculum innovation in electrical and computer engineering.
Joshua E. Katz http://orcid.org/0009-0001-3320-2536 University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign [biography]

Joshua E. Katz is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, DELTA program, at UIUC, where his research centers on collaborative learning in engineering education and other STEM disciplines. He obtained his B.S. in Technology and Engineering Education in 2019 and his M.S. in STEM Education and Leadership in 2021 from Illinois State University. Additionally, he holds a professional educator license for secondary education in Technology and Engineering Education in Illinois.
Dr. Marcia Pool http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2813-4217 University of Illinois at 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.
Lara Hebert University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign [biography]

Serves as the Outreach and Public Engagement Coordinator for The Grainger College of Engineering. She brings to this position and this initiative expertise in teacher education and curriculum design.
Yael Gertner University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign [biography]

Dr Gertner joined the Computer Science Department at the University of Illinois in 2020 as a Teaching Assistant Professor. She received her B.S. and MEng in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT, and Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She was a Beckman Fellow at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her current focus is on broadening participation in Computer Science and Computer Science Education She has been developing materials and teaching for iCAN, a new program for broadening participation in CS for students who have a bachelor’s degree in a field other than computer science.
Mr. Saadeddine Shehab University of Illinois at 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.
Hyena Cho http://orcid.org/0009-0003-6244-9778 University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign [biography]

Hyena Cho is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, specializing in Human Resource Development. She holds a B.A. and M.A. in Education from Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. Her research focuses on learning and development in engineering education contexts, using quantitative and qualitative methods to examine workplace and organizational learning that supports safe, inclusive, and learning-friendly environments. She is particularly interested in STEM and medical education, with an emphasis on student and faculty learning, creativity, and professional identity formation.

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 21, 2026, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 24, 2026