Collaborative outreach programs strive to drive innovation and development

Spanish-American Philosopher George Santayana said, “The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.”

Following that pathway, multiple University of Illinois Chicago programs have been developed to create success, drive innovation, and develop the skills of future and current working professionals. The Biomedical Engineering for Science Teachers (BEST) program and the Clinical Immersion Program (CIP) are collaborative programs between the Richard and Loan Hill Department of Biomedical Engineering and the College of Education and the College of Medicine, respectively.

Helping teachers do their BEST

The BEST program provides Chicago Public Schools high school teachers with the ability to develop pre-engineering and science classroom curricula through working in a biomedical research lab.

Through the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, Richard and Loan Hill Clinical Professor Miiri Kotche and Clinical Assistant Professor in Curriculum and Instruction in the College of Education Jennifer Olson were awarded a five-year grant in 2016, and a renewal in 2021, to prepare CPS teachers to teach diverse student populations. As the only grant request awarded in the first round of the NIH grant, this joint program helps Olson and Kotche support teachers and expose students to biomedical engineering. The six-week program matches CPS teachers to a laboratory under the guidance of biomedical engineering faculty mentors.

BEST co-directors Kotche and Olson’s joint grant helps teachers benefit from learning more about science and assists them in bringing that knowledge back to their classrooms. As a former CPS teacher, Olson has a passion for helping these overextended and under resourced schools.

Hands on experience

CIP provides biomedical engineering students with the skills to get them ready for their future careers by placing them into a real-life clinical environment where they can see, research, and then try to solve a problem through efficient engineering design. The program pairs undergraduate biomedical engineering and medical students to create an interdisciplinary experience.

CIP assists engineering students in senior design, a two-semester course required for all College of Engineering seniors, that helps the students gather all the knowledge and skills they’ve acquired at UIC Engineering and put them to work to solve a real-world design problem.

Research about CIP, conducted by Kotche, Clinical Associate Professor Anthony Felder, and Clinical Assistant Professor Michael Browne, is enhancing the education of biomedical engineering students by focusing on the real-world experiences provided to past participants and has included new and revised courses and programs to identify clinical needs and develop compelling solutions to meet them.

Full immersion for teachers, students

Both collaborative programs equip students and teachers with the skills and resources to enhance not only their own careers, but further their knowledge and provide real-world experiences to advance their skills.

“In engineering education, we’re so focused on the technical components of the curriculum and being an engineer and industry relies heavily on that, but clinical immersion really gives students unique skills that other disciplines don’t, so they get this experience put into this practice of biomedical engineering,” Browne said. “That’s a unique and rare experience that is really exciting that we have students who can then leverage that for their careers.”

Similarly for BEST, Von Steuben Metropolitan Science Center teacher and program participant Madison Delaney’s classes “focus on the fundamentals of engineering and design so we’ll learn about the iterative design process while thinking about how they can research prototypes and improve designs for various projects throughout the year,” she said. “Some of the three main skills that they will focus on are creating working drawings, different views of what they are building, and once we are designing models, how to build models and test these designs to see how they’re working figuring out how to change and improve their designs.”

This will help Delaney expose her CPS students to the practices of biomedical engineering and give them the skills to pursue science and engineering in the future.

The BEST program includes the idea of a community of practice for teachers to come together to support each other. Sometimes, the newer teachers spark new ideas, and the veteran teachers can add the things that have worked over the years, and it becomes a space for sharing.

CIP and senior design “give students a certain kind of empathy, allowing them to see things from the different perspectives of their colleagues, physicians, nurses, other caregivers, and patients,” Browne said.

“Students have a plethora of different experiences and opinions and beliefs that if you really give them an opportunity to engage and discuss with each other, they can create a really rich and interactive environment and be mutually beneficial in the way that students can definitely learn from one another both from their similarities and the things that they share, but especially from their differences in upbringing, differences, and beliefs,” Delaney said.

Passing on past knowledge

Both programs involve an iterative process allowing teachers and students to use their experiences and previous knowledge to advance current projects, designs, and curricula.

“The iterative process takes our failures to see where we went wrong, what we needed, and then my responsibility is to teach them this is what you guys did and these were the results this is what is actually happening,” said Julio Mendez, two-time program participant and Von Steuben Metropolitan Science Center teacher. “It’s about them understanding that I’m not looking for the exact answer, I’m looking for the attempt and the thinking to get to the right answer.”

With the senior design course, “students are really eager to get their hands on things and build things, but they lean on techniques that they’ve learned elsewhere in the curriculum,” Browne said. “When it comes to developing prototypes, we want them to explore past those previous techniques, so we want to add to their toolbox of skills so that they have more abilities and more technological options to use.”

For example, when students learn about 3D printing suddenly every project requires 3D printing, and the truth is that most things don’t so we’re trying to break bad habits, Felder said.

The CIP includes a curriculum that is tied closer to reality to help students to find positions faster, be more prepared throughout their careers, and have better experiences to leverage in their interviews and ways to represent themselves as a practicing engineer.

Kotche explained that these teachers are involved in this program as learners and a lot of them will bring their experiences back to their students and say, “Look what I learned this summer and now I’m going to teach it to you.”

“The combination of all this amazing engineering content and these science concepts, but also the pedagogical content knowledge that’s at the core of the program and I think that’s what they bring away from it,” Olson said. “The other takeaway is this collaboration. For instance, current Program Assistant and doctoral student in the Math and Science Education Program in the College of Education Darren Collins, who has also participated in the program multiple times, created two units this summer and one of them is the ethics of biomedical engineering research. Some of the other teachers have said they will be borrowing that lesson plan so they’re not only going out into their classrooms and doing ‘this is my two-week unit,’ but they’re infusing other pieces of it with others.”