When Brian Lee came to the University of Kentucky College of Agriculture, Food and Environment in 2003, he became part of a team in the Department of Landscape Architecture that already had a history of teaching students through service to their communities. Now more than 10 years later, his part in that effort recently earned him the Excellence in Service-Learning award from the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture at its annual meeting in Baltimore.

“This award was really the culmination of more than a decade of service-learning projects in our department,” Lee said. “All our students are required to be part of a service-learning project. It really solidifies what they are learning in the classroom and gives them confidence that they can apply that learning in the world, while also providing a service to a community.”

Lee is an associate professor and is interested in understanding how to connect people to decisions made at the site scale to water quality and watershed processes. He teaches five courses including the introductory landscape architecture course as well as a junior level studio, and several geospatial analyses courses.

Some of the projects from this past decade of teaching have included Beyond the Legacy, a plan for what happens after the initial creation of the Legacy Trail in Lexington; the Flight 93 National Memorial in Pennsylvania where students provided the National Park Service with a series of ideas that generated design proposals for the overall master plan as well as individual challenges on site; The Hills Project where students generated ideas, guidelines and recommendations for both the development and preservation of Northern Kentucky's hillsides. Many other projects are listed on the KLEAR website at http://www.uky.edu/Ag/LA/KLEAR/.