Eli Shupe, Ph.D.

Starting at UTA in 2021, Dr. Eli Shupe is new to service learning and she plans to incorporate it into her intro to bioethics course. She states that the focus on end-of-life care will include service learning as students are going to engage with the family members of the dying patients as well as interact with the patients.

Eli only heard of few professors that taught with service learning before becoming a faculty fellow and did not expect so much institutional knowledge about it. She believes service learning is important since it gives the learners a natural experience or real engagement with the community in relation to what is being learned in the classroom setting.

She enjoyed the challenge of implementing service learning into intro to bioethics which led her to redesign the course. She believes that service learning gives students experience applying what they are learning about in class to the real world.

For those hesitant on implementing service learning Eli relates to the emotion, she liked the idea but did not know how she was going to do it which made her more conscious on how she was redesigning her course. She encourages faculty to try implementing the service learning approach because it is the kind of thing every faculty member should try or at least think about.