Uni students and faculty made their annual trip to Booker T. Washington STEM elementary school in Champaign in April to lead students in activities celebrating St. Elmo Brady, a chemist who was the first African American to earn a PhD in chemistry in the United States. Brady earned the degree at the University of Illinois in 1915.
Each year, Uni students plan and teach water-related lessons and activities around Earth Day to share with kindergarten through fifth grade students. This year, kindergarten and first grade students enjoyed having Uni students and faculty lead them in activities such as painting rock bugs, water relays, and seed starting. Second and third grade students made maracas from recycled materials with the Orchestra Outreach Club, made paper flowers, and worked on a tower-building design challenge. Older students worked with teams of Uni students to clean up Douglass park, make balloon-powered cars, and learn about bioluminescence.
The event is organized by Uni’s Coordinator of Equity and Public Engagement, Valerie
O’Brien.
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Faculty present at international lab school conference
Uni High faculty members along with a U. of I. staff member and a pre-service teacher presented this year at the International Association of Laboratory Schools conference in Finland. The trip was funded in part by Uni’s Innovations in Learning Fund. The Uni/U. of I. contingent shared that in addition to their presentations (listed below), they took advantage of opportunities to learn about the Finnish education system, observe the wide range of ways that lab school philosophies are implemented, and made connections with other lab school teachers from around the world.
Uni social studies teacher Andrew Wilson presented with a U. of I. preservice teacher, Alexander Paul, on building intrinsic restraint among students as a means of curbing cognitive offloading and/or surrender.
Uni social studies teacher Melissa Schoeplein presented about Uni’s annual oral history project with WILL/Illinois Public Media as part of the conference’s Student Voices strand. The talk was titled, “Empowering Youth Storytellers and Media Makers: A Lab School’s Annual Oral History Project.”
An interdisciplinary team of Uni teachers (Emily Buhnerkempe and Leah Avila, math, Lisa Evans, fine arts, and Melissa Schoeplein, social studies) presented
on their recent collaboration with the University of Illinois’ Siebel Center for Design to create human-centered design (HCD) projects for their Uni classrooms. The presentation focused on what Human-Centered Design is and gave examples of how it could be implemented into different lessons. Human-Centered Design (HCD) uses a creative collaborative problem-solving approach to tackle complex, real world challenges.
Buhnerkempe also presented a poster session titled “Design Thinking Meets Data Thinking: Engaging Statistics Students in Real-World Research Through HumanCentered Design.” The poster highlighted a statistics project developed for students at Uni that uses the Human-centered design (HCD) framework to teach students about data collection and analysis. In collaboration with the University of Illinois Child Development Laboratory (CDL), Siebel Center for Design, and faculty in Statistics and Data Science, high school statistics students pursued authentic research focused on children ages 6-weeks to 5-years.
Evans also delivered a poster presentation recapping Uni Design Lab — an 8-year partnership with Dr. Cliff Shin from the Industrial Design Department of the School of Visual Arts at U of I. University of Illinois Director of Threat Assessment Moni Marcelo and Uni High Assistant Director of Student Life Bridget Hughes presented “From Compliance to Excellence: Partnering to Build a Model Threat Assessment Team in a Laboratory High School”. The session offered attendees a comprehensive look at behavioral threat assessment as both a preventative framework and a collaborative practice