Summer program gives Chicago teachers hands-on lessons to take back to class

Over the last decade, dozens of Chicago Public Schools teachers have started the school year armed with a curriculum they developed themselves at a UIC summer program on biomedical engineering, which brings together biology, physical sciences and chemistry with engineering.

The six-week program, run jointly by the College of Engineering and the College of Education, aimed to get high school students interested in biomedical engineering, served as a future pipeline to the field and sought to provide professional development for high school science teachers.

In all, 72 teachers from 43 schools participated in the Biomedical Engineering Experience for Science Teachers, or BEST, program since 2016. They spent part of their summer in UIC’s biomedical engineering research labs learning about the field and creating classroom curricula. They also each received an $8,000 stipend and $1,000 to buy supplies for their classrooms. Each teacher in the program teaches about 150 students a year.

The program was funded with two five-year grants, in 2016 and 2021, from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering. The latest grant ends this year.

During the summer program, Anna Fimmel, a science teacher at Hubbard High School in the West Lawn neighborhood, participated in lab discussions and observed experiments in the lab of Irena Levitan, UIC professor of medicine, pharmacology and bioengineering. Fimmel said she will use what she learned to teach her sophomore and junior classes this coming year.

“I will use this program to get my students to think like scientists, directly utilizing the strategies from the Levitan lab,” Fimmel said. “They will also be given tools to explore the world around them and apply scientific tools to questions of social justice.”

As a former neuroscience graduate student, she says the program helps science teachers learn about new technology. Fimmel is already an alum of the program – she also participated in it in 2022.

“I think it’s important for science teachers to understand what doing science actually looks like these days,” Fimmel said. “Preparing students for a world that existed a decade ago but not today is a waste of time.”

The program is the brainchild of Miiri Kotche, the Richard and Loan Hill Clinical Professor of Biomedical Engineering and associate dean of undergraduate affairs in the UIC College of Engineering, and Jennifer Olson, clinical associate professor in curriculum and instruction and associate dean of teacher education in the College of Education.

“They get to lean into the assets of the College of Engineering and the College of Education and then go back to their schools and share their new content knowledge and pedagogical skills with their students,” said Olson, a former Chicago Public Schools teacher.

Kotche said they developed the Biomedical Engineering Experience for Science Teachers with an eye toward growing the field in the future.

“If they had a great experience, and have an understanding of what biomedical engineering was, they can open the door to increase interest of CPS students considering biomedical engineering as a major,” Kotche said of teachers participating in the program.

During the last day of the program, teachers met to discuss their experience, and the lesson plans they will bring to their classrooms. Program alums returned, too, like Irving Hernandez, a former physics teacher and now dean of curriculum and instruction at Aspira Business and Finance High School in the Avondale neighborhood. He participated in the program in 2021.

As an administrator, Hernandez said, he has used what he learned in the program to empower the nearly 40 teachers on his staff and the 400 students in his school.

“When you’re developing curricula from professionals and you’re bringing it back to the classroom, there is a level of empowerment that you bring to your class,” Hernandez said. “When you show your students that you are a primary source of a career that they can take part in, you are giving them an opportunity to feel more connected.”

Biomedical engineering employs engineering principles to advance human health. It’s the field responsible for medical devices, procedures and other technology to better diagnose, treat and prevent diseases. At UIC, the teachers got an up-close look at work being done on the forefront of the field, an opportunity that makes this program unique, according to Kotche. They visited labs where work is underway on artificial tissues, rehabilitation engineering for stroke patients and traumatic brain injury.

Catherine Stewart, who teaches biology to freshman students at Senn High School in the Edgewater neighborhood, watched the work of UIC doctoral candidate Giulia Venturini. Venturini is developing a device to sort and analyze bacteria encapsulated in water-in-oil droplets, in order to study gene transfer in the bacteria in Streptococcus pneumoniae, the cause of pneumonia. Another experiment looked at the causes of cardiovascular disease by testing hydrostatic pressure on HUVEC cells, cells from human umbilical cord veins that are widely used to study endothelial cell behavior and function.

Stewart is already planning to use these real-life examples from the lab to teach her students about homeostasis in the body, the cardiovascular system and cell function, and about how labs work together to solve problems.

“Getting to work in this lab really opened up some doors as far as what’s out there and what we can expose our students to,” Stewart said. “I think they’re going to benefit because the curriculum that I am working on is hands-on.”

Jocelyn Butanas, a science teacher at Corliss High School in the Pullman neighborhood, said as she works on her curriculum for the upcoming year, she is focused on teaching what she learned – “the scientific method in action.”

“That’s what I’m trying to build in my curriculum, building the scientific skills that my students will be doing,” Butanas said. “With this exposure and this opportunity, I get to dig deeper.”

Reflecting on the history of the Biomedical Engineering Experience for Science Teachers program, she said teachers have benefitted by learning how scientists and engineers work in an interdisciplinary way.

“It’s not just from books. You get to see the real thing and share the experience with the students,” Butanas said. “As a teacher, I’m better prepared for the next school year and can weave in what I’ve learned from this lab.”