Michigan Education Magazine Spring 2022

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everal weeks ago, our graduates filled Hill Auditorium to celebrate commencement with their friends, families, faculty, and fellow graduates. It was the first time since 2019 that we were able to hold this joyous event and it was made particularly special by the 2020 and 2021 graduates who were able to join the class of 2022 in reviving this important tradition.

“Commencement” means “beginning,” which is the perfect way to think about our graduates heading toward the next phase of their careers. It also has meaning for our School of Education as we embark together on our second century of teaching, learning, researching, building, uplifting, and transforming.

We hold the challenges and opportunities of our current moment in clear focus as we blaze the path ahead. We are using our rich and deep understanding of teaching and learning at all levels—pre-K through higher education—to make meaningful, lasting improvements in our world.

With the largest gift in our school’s history, we are heading into our second century poised to reshape learning and teaching by advancing knowledge and practical applications in the learning sciences. The generous investment from Ms. Eileen Lappin Weiser will found a center dedicated to the creation of powerful child- and youth-centered learning experiences.

As we welcome the first faculty hires of our new century we are proud to attract the next generation of education experts, collaborators, and mentors to our community. The excellence of our faculty will continue to define our school as their work drives us in fascinating and vital new directions.

In our next century, we are exploring ways to bring our knowledge of teaching and learning to

Cover: Graduation photo by Leisa Thompson

myriad contexts both in and out of the classroom.

Educators have the potential—even obligation—to support the emergence of a more collaborative, dialogic society in which all people can communicate across difference. What if we prepared more people to think like teachers? They would prioritize listening, learning, and understanding. This inclination could change the way that people engage with one another, particularly when approaching challenging topics and attempting to solve complex problems.

Though our work extends in many directions, we share a core commitment to diversity, inclusion, justice, and equity (dije). From practicing socially just and antiracist pedagogies to using our research findings to advocate for just policies, we enter our next century with the recognition that studying and improving education are inseparable from our determination to develop more effective and socially just systems.

We begin this issue of Michigan Education with an introduction to the six alumni who were recognized as School of Education Alumni Award recipients.

Established in honor of our centennial, these awards celebrate alumni who extend the mission and values of our school through their work. Our congratulations go to Dr. Ann Austin, Dr. Brian Burt, Mr. Travon Jefferson, Mrs. Alycia Meriweather, Dr. Laura Perna, and Dr. Lin Chu Wong, who were chosen by the selection committee in three different award categories. Our alumni inspire us with their profound contributions to their communities and the field of education.

In our P-20 partnership school, The School at Marygrove, SOE alumna and teaching resident Ms. Isra Elshafei teaches a class on robotics to 11th graders as part of the school’s Human Centered

Design and Engineering curriculum. Readers may be surprised to learn how many skills and subjects can be taught through building and programming robots.

Inspired by Michigan Engineering’s Robotics 101 course, this high school level class exemplifies the exciting curriculum and outstanding instruction that characterizes this partnership.

The research teams in our Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education investigate equitable access to education opportunity from applying to college to paying off student loan debt years after graduation. In this issue, Dr. Peter Bahr shares findings from his projects investigating how community college systems can better serve the needs of their students.

This work is critically important in part because of the diverse and underserved populations that rely on community college instruction as a path to greater economic opportunity.

As part of our commitment to make education expertise accessible, useful, and responsive to the needs we hear expressed, we are pleased to announce the launch of our new EdHub for Community and Professional Learning. The nascent EdHub is growing quickly to offer courses, events, and professional credentials for educators, policymakers, families, and everyone who wants to engage more deeply with education topics. We invite you to join us from wherever you are in the world. The EdHub vision is to build a global community around the improvement of education.

In response to significant teacher shortages, we expanded our Michigan Alternate Route to Certification program this year to help Michigan districts fill vacancies with qualified, dedicated educators. Michiganders who hold a bachelor’s degree and want to enter the teaching workforce can begin work quickly and with supervision and support for three years. With a current enrollment of 47 and growing—and an average participant age of 39 years—the program has drawn aspiring teachers from across Michigan’s lower peninsula, many of whom are career-changers or previously worked in other education-related roles. We hope that together with our other two certification pathways—bachelor’s with certification and master’s with certification—we can ease the strain on schools and families and remove barriers for people interested in entering the teaching profession.

We enter this new century of our school’s history with the bold ideas, collaborative spirit, and unyielding conviction to make transformational contributions to our world. ■

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Meet the Inaugural Alumni Award Recipients A new annual award is launched in honor of the SOE’s centennial

Dean Elizabeth Birr Moje

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Editor Danielle Dimcheff

Professor Peter Bahr’s research aims to improve how community colleges serve the diverse needs of students

Writers Jeanne Hodesh Shaun Manning Fernanda Pires Chris Tiffany

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Design Savitski Design, Ann Arbor Hammond Design, Ann Arbor

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We invite you to join the conversation by submitting ideas for future issues, letters to the editor, and class notes. soe.umich.edu/magazine

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Stay connected!

Web: soe.umich.edu Facebook: UMichEducation Twitter: UMichEducation Instagram: UMichEducation Office of Communications 610 East University Avenue Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-1259 soe.communications@umich.edu

Growing Economic Opportunity Through Community Colleges Coming to a Screen Near You The EdHub for Community and Professional Learning

Robots Bring Math and Engineering Lessons to Life A peek inside Isra Elshafei’s robotics class at The School at Marygrove

A Systemic Solution to the Michigan Teacher Shortage SOE’s Michigan Alternate Route to Certification expands its program to create the Initial Certification Pathway

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Happenings Champions for Education Class Notes The Back Page

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After 18 months of primarily remote work and study, the SOE community came together at Fall Convocation. Faculty, staff, and students discussed the newly-created Community Care Compact, a code of mutual respect and support to guide the community as it moves forward together.

Right The Centennial Conversation series culminated with a visit from Roberto Rodríguez (AB ’97), U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education, who joined Dean Moje and members of the SOE community to discuss his and the nation’s priorities for education.

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Top Planned by graduate students, UX@UM was a two-day conference that connected design innovators with industry experts through user experience papers, posters, tutorial sessions, and roundtables. The conference served as a platform for graduate students to create and share their products, designs, and research in the area of UX. Middle The SOE recruitment team introduced current undergrads to the SOE at the 2022 Major/Minor Expo. Each year, students flock to the event at the Michigan Union to explore 70+ majors and 100+ minors. We’re not picking favorites, but there were plenty of future teachers in the crowd.

Bottom Alumni, students, and faculty attending the 2022 annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in San Diego, California, enjoyed meeting up with colleagues at the U-M party, which was held at the San Diego Wine & Culinary Center.

Top Students, faculty, and staff from The School at Marygrove showed off their school pride after returning to their beautiful campus in fall 2021.

Bottom The EdHub Town Hall, EdHub’s inaugural event in its Community Engagement series, called together practitioners, administrators, and researchers to discuss the teacher shortage in Michigan.

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A new annual award is launched in honor of the SOE’s centennial

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The Office of Development and Alumni Relations has launched two annual alumni awards: the Distinguished Alumni Award and the Emerging Leader Alumni Award.

Each award recognizes the incredible accomplishments of alumni, whether they are seasoned professionals or newer to their careers.

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In addition to these awards, the selection committee also gave a special honor this year— the Centennial Scholar Award—to a member of the SOE community whose life’s work embodies the school’s mission and its highest ideals.

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Meet the Inaugural Alumni Award Recipients

Dr. Ann Austin

t was while serving as a peer counselor during her undergraduate years at Bates College that Dr. Ann Austin (AM ’82, PhD ’84) came to know Judith Isaacson, then the college’s dean of students. A Holocaust survivor who had been interned in a concentration camp as a teenager, Isaacson later immigrated to America and studied at Bates herself. Austin recalls her vividly as someone who was “filled with life and joy” as well as a desire to “support the learning of students and their life development.”

Her influence left a lasting impression on Austin. “I thought, if I could have the kind of positive influence that she had in terms of the compassion, the way in which she sup-

ported the learning of the undergraduates— that would be a career well worth living. She is the inspiration that made me think I’d like to go into higher education.”

Following a master’s program in higher education at Syracuse University, Austin gained administrative experience as an admissions counselor. By the time she got to U-M as a doctoral student in the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education at the SOE, she had become interested in academic work itself, and, while in graduate school, specifically the academic workplace.

“Studying the academic workplace leads you to think about questions around teaching and learning, as well as the overall purpose of the university, and how we translate our work into application and practice,” says Austin.

As she continued to study both topics—the academic career and improving teaching and learning—she began to realize the issues she was drawn to all had to do with change within academic contexts. Ultimately, Austin homed in on the training of doctoral students.

“They’re very well prepared for research, but not always as much for teaching,” says Austin. “How do we improve their preparation so they can teach better?” It was a matter, she recognized, of organizational change. She focused much research on the professional development and learning of faculty mem-

bers, and her work caught the attention of the National Academy of Sciences who recognized the struggle for researchers to integrate what research tells us about effective teaching and learning into their own practice. “They literally called me up one day and said, ‘Could you write a short paper and explain why we know a lot about good teaching but it is hard to get faculty to change and use what we know?’”

They imagined the problem would be fairly easy to address, recalls Austin with a laugh.

The paper she produced articulated why it is hard to change how faculty do their work— and it struck a chord. After publication of the paper, people from across the STEM fields began to contact Austin, eager to understand more about how change happens in academe, especially to improve teaching.

In 2003, Austin co-founded the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL), a network of prominent universities dedicated to helping science graduate students develop teaching skills they can use to enhance learning in the sciences, especially at the undergraduate level.

The original collaboration among six universities has expanded to more than 40 today.

“CIRTL was not only a practical action project dedicated to strengthening teaching in the sciences,” wrote a colleague who nominated Austin for the Distinguished Alumni

Well aware that imposter syndrome can set in, Burt has students complete a self-evaluation at the start of each semester. He also asks for an updated CV. His aim is to help his students create a record for themselves so that they can sense their own progress without relying on his recognition—or that provided by awards and publication— to feel a sense of their own achievement.

“My research deals with broadening participation among Black men and other underrepresented populations in STEM. It’s about helping to address and redress systemic and historical issues that have

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ot yet a decade out of his doctoral program in the SOE’s Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education, Dr. Brian Burt (PhD ’14) already has an impressive record of publication— including 16 articles in top-tier journals, four book chapters, and two research briefs.

But what stood out to the former student who recommended Burt for the Emerging Leader Alumni Award wasn’t the sheer volume of his work. “Nine out of the 16 articles [Burt] has published since 2014 were coauthored by graduate students,” noted the recommender, highlighting the young professor’s commitment to helping his students navigate all aspects of academia—including publishing. He went on to write that Burt’s mentorship extended in numerous other directions “from quick text conversations about decisions, to helping me conceptualize research ideas, and reminding me that I was indeed worthy of being at Michigan.”

Burt’s research explores the experiences of underrepresented graduate students of color in the field of engineering, a topic he came to while a doctoral student at U-M. As a new student adapting to the rigorous academic environment, Burt kept his social life to a minimum. But when friends in the College of Engineering invited him to join their circle, Burt picked up on something.

“I didn’t really hang out that much, but some of my friends were in STEM programs across campus, and they had lots of gatherings. I was always curious why they were gathering so often. I began to wonder if they knew that by gathering, they were retaining each other.”

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Dr. Brian Burt

What started as simple intellectual curiosity soon turned into a project for the qualitative research class Burt was taking at the time with Dr. Michael Bastedo.

“I didn’t have to have an end goal in mind to start the project,” recalls Burt. Bastedo encouraged him to see where his curiosity led him. “I knew there was something that I was observing, but I had no clue what it was.

That’s what made me excited. I was trying to figure out the details of something that wasn’t clear in the knowledge base at all.”

Prior to the qualitative research class, Burt had envisioned a career in higher education administration—perhaps as a dean, or a vice president of student affairs. But pursuing the mystery of the unexplained phenomenon he was witnessing among his friends in STEM made him feel like a detective. He was hooked.

“It was the first time I remember saying out loud, ‘I feel like a scholar.’”

Now an associate professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin, Burt says that every aspect of what he does on a daily basis is related to equity, diversity, and inclusion.

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Award, “it was also a research project that yielded grants and publications.” A National Science Foundation grant was among these, which Austin received to study the use of networks as a means to scale improvements in undergraduate STEM education. Another project involved changing the evaluation of teaching to promote more faculty reflection, collaboration, and improvement. In the two decades since then, her work around organizational change has evolved to focus as well on inclusivity when it comes to race and gender, particularly in STEM fields.

An internationally renowned scholar, Austin has traveled the world sharing her research and expertise with university administrators and faculty leaders. In 1998, she was recognized by Change magazine as one of 40 “Young Leaders of the Academy.”

In 2000, she was elected President of the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE). She is the author or co-author of 50 book chapters and dozens of articles in peer-reviewed journals and practitionerfocused venues where she has translated research to practice. She has received ASHE’s Research Achievement Award, the Exemplary Research Award from Division J in AREA, and a Fulbright Fellowship in South Africa. Numerous nominators cited Austin’s excellence as a scholar, teacher, mentor, and administrator, as well as her national and international reputation—a “quintuple threat,” as one nominator put it.

Currently University Distinguished Professor and Interim Dean of the College of Education at Michigan State University, Austin says it is important to her to be motivated by a set of values that demonstrate kindness and compassion. “I try to live a life that is going to help make other people’s lives better, make the world better.”

As a young faculty member raising three children, Austin says she realized the importance of exercising gratitude. Rather than think of what she had to do for her kids or her job as obligations, “I thought it would be better for me to say to myself, I’m incredibly fortunate to have a life that’s filled with wonderful things—wonderful work, wonderful people I love. When things get hard, I remind myself that I have a lot to be grateful for.” ■

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Meet the Inaugural Alumni Award Recipients

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prevented people from having access to these fields. And realizing that to solve the nation’s and the world’s biggest problems, we have to figure out ways to get more people in these positions to help contribute and solve these issues.”

Although Burt’s scholarship focuses on the STEM fields, his research translates to his own professional practice as a mentor.

Well aware that imposter syndrome can set in, Burt has students complete a self-evaluation at the start of each semester. He also asks for an updated CV. His aim is to help his students create a record for themselves so that they can sense their own progress without relying on his recognition—or that provided by awards and publication—to feel a sense of their own achievement.

“I want them to feel excited about their growth and their own learning, not necessarily the external reward.”

Reflecting on his time at the SOE, Burt says that he benefited from mentors including professors Lisa Lattuca, Carla O’Conor, and Philip Bowman. He also recalls a standing weekly lunch date he had with two fellow CSHPE students (Drs. Christopher Nellum and James Ellis). Together they celebrated each other’s victories of the week, and discussed challenges they might have had.

“They allowed me to dream about what I would be like if I were to become a faculty member. I remember saying that I would never want any of my students to ever question that they were good enough or why they were there, or that there had been a mistake about them being in the program.”

Burt says that the mentorship he benefited from served as the model for what he practices today. So whether it’s co-authoring an article, or connecting them with contacts in his network, Burt brings his students along with him.

“Everything that I’m doing—at every stage—I’m including my students in these processes.” ■

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Travon Jefferson

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ravon Jefferson (ABEd ’16) still recalls the advice Dr. Kendra L. Hearn bestowed on him when he was an undergrad at the SOE. “I remember sitting in her office and she was explaining to me that one powerful thing you can always have your students do is write. Have them write every day.”

In his fifth grade classroom in Houston, Texas, Jefferson put Hearn’s advice into action by having his students keep journals.

Jefferson provided prompts like, “If you had a superpower, what would it be?” or “If you could go back in time and change one thing, what would you do?”

“Originally, a lot of the topics were lighthearted. But when I actually read the journals, I noticed they were pretty dark.”

One student wrote, “I wish I had the power to control the weather. That way, when Hurricane Harvey happened, I could have stopped it.” The student went on to explain that their family was displaced because of the storm, and had to stay in a shelter. Another student wrote of wishing she could go back in time and stop her father from committing suicide.

“I realized, I’m coming in here and teaching these students every day, and this is the baggage they’re carrying. When do they have the opportunity to deal with it?”

Following graduate school, Jefferson was selected to join Teach Plus Texas as a policy fellow, a rigorous professional development program for teachers who want to become leaders in shaping education policy and advocacy. The cohort was asked to identify problems facing their school communities.

Some fellows brought up instruction, others mentioned school finances. But between Hurricane Harvey, the racist 2019 massacre in an El Paso supermarket, and the regular occurrence of school shootings, when it was Jefferson’s turn to speak, he said his students’ mental health was under attack.

“We can’t just rely on the school counselor,” says Jefferson, noting that his school at the time had one counselor for 500 students. “Counselors are great, but they’re spread thin. So the teachers are the first responders.” Jefferson’s Teach Plus fellowship cohort comprised teachers from across the state. As he spoke to the group, he noticed that his colleagues were all nodding in agreement. “No matter if they taught in a rural, urban, suburban, private, charter, or public school—every teacher agreed that our students need mental health support.”

Jefferson wrote an op-ed titled “Train Teachers to Support Students Who Have Experienced Trauma.” It picked up steam on Twitter—it was retweeted by John B. King, Jr., former Secretary of Education in the Obama administration and founder of My Brother’s Keeper, among many others.

The superintendent of Houston’s independent school district wrote Jefferson personally to congratulate him on the piece.

A working group was formed to write a policy recommendation which would require Texas school districts to train staff in trauma-informed care and include traumainformed instruction training among the components of renewing a teaching certification. Jefferson wrote an op-ed titled “Train Teachers to Support Students Who Have Experienced Trauma.” It picked up steam on Twitter—it was retweeted by John B. King,

She became the city-wide supervisor of middle school science, eventually heading the science department for the district, and then heading the curriculum department, where she oversaw mathematics, science, social studies, ELA, athletics, world languages, music, and art. From there she went on to serve as interim superintendent for 14 months as the district transitioned from state to local control.

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s a child, Alycia Meriweather (ABEd ’95, TeachCert ’95) loved playing school. She gathered her stuffed animals together, sometimes throwing her two little sisters into the “class” as well, and proceeded to lead the day’s lesson.

“As I’ve gotten older, I understand that it’s somewhat rare to know exactly what you want to do at an early age. I always knew I wanted to be a teacher, and I always knew I wanted to come back to help with the revitalization of Detroit through public education,” says Meriweather, a lifelong Detroiter who is now the Deputy Superintendent of Partnerships and Innovation for the Detroit Public Schools Community District (DPSCD).

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Alycia Meriweather

She got her start in room 128 at Farwell Middle School on the east side of the city.

There, she channeled her passion for science to inspire her seventh grade students. It was also where she first met Dr. Elizabeth Moje, who was then part of a team of U-M researchers piloting the LeTUS curriculum, an effort to foster inquiry-oriented science instruction in urban middle schools.

“Being part of that project really helped accelerate my career, as both a teacher and a leader,” recalls Meriweather. The work she launched in partnership with several SOE projects spread across the school district. She began to write curriculum and lead professional development workshops. When a colleague whose work she admired passed away, she applied to fill their role, making the leap from the classroom to administration.

“To leave the classroom was a very difficult decision for me because I love kids so much. But I also knew from the professional development sessions I’d been facilitating the impact I could have on other teachers and their students. At the middle school level, a teacher is teaching potentially 150180 students every day, so if you can impact the teacher, you can exponentially impact the number of students who are having a better learning experience in Detroit public schools. That really interested me.”

Meriweather became the city-wide supervisor of middle school science, eventually heading the science department for the district, and then heading the curriculum department, where she oversaw mathematics, science, social studies, ELA, athletics, world languages, music, and art. From there she went on to serve as interim superintendent for 14 months as the district transitioned from state to local control.

Meriweather’s efforts to impact change extend beyond her district. She takes seriously her role in helping legislators and other decision makers understand the impact their policies will have when put into practice. “Oftentimes, people who are making policy don’t have a connection to the implementation of the policy. You have to help people who don’t do this work every day understand the importance of the work, the impact of the work, and what their decisions mean.”

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Jr., former Secretary of Education in the Obama administration and founder of My Brother’s Keeper, among many others. The superintendent of Houston’s independent school district wrote Jefferson personally to congratulate him on the piece.

With his working group’s policy memo in hand, Jefferson went to the state capital to meet with legislators.

“They were like ‘Wow, this type of problem doesn’t have a political side. Whether Republican or Democrat, or in between— everyone needs some type of mental health support.’”

Eventually, the exact language his group had proposed in their policy recommendation was incorporated into Texas House Bill 18, which increases mental health training for educators and other school professionals to aid in early identification and intervention, emphasizes the importance of mental health education for students, and improves access to mental and behavior health services through school-based mental health centers and the hiring of mental health professionals. The law went into effect on September 1, 2021.

Jefferson, who is now a lead fellow with Teach Plus, has shifted his focus to teacher retention. He has developed the Liberation Coalition, an affinity group for educators of color who are promoting anti-racism in their classrooms and school policies. A colleague who nominated Jefferson for the Emerging Leader Alumni Award noted, “Travon is a leader in the school community here. He is the reason I became a teacher in Houston.”

Currently a seventh grade social studies teacher at KIPP Spirit College Prep, Jefferson prides himself on teaching culturally relevant texts. He still has his students write in class, and he practices what he preaches: outside of school, he’s at work on a novel. ■

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Meet the Inaugural Alumni Award Recipients

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On behalf of DPSCD, Meriweather’s work in partnership with the SOE has continued over the years. Now a member of the Dean’s Advisory Council, she has been instrumental in guiding the P-20 Partnership and development of The School at Marygrove.

Meriweather still misses teaching in the classroom, but as a driver of change, she keeps her ears open, taking every chance she gets to hear from her best informants: kids. On a Saturday last fall, overseeing a vaccine clinic that was taking place in a district school, she spoke with students as they waited in the observation area after receiving their shots. She pulled up a chair next to three sisters and began to chat. Where did they go to school? Did they like it? Who was their favorite teacher? Which class did they enjoy the most?

The same reasons she loved playing school as a kid herself still hold true.

“Every single title I have held during my career in DPSCD has been a blessing, giving me the privilege and opportunity to make decisions, influence policy, and implement programs to make life better for kids in Detroit—my childhood dream has been my lived reality and I am truly thankful!” ■

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Dr. Laura Perna

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aving grown up in a small town in northern New Jersey, moving to the city of Philadelphia to attend the University of Pennsylvania was “a big deal” for Dr. Laura Perna (MPP ’92, PhD ’97). Initially she thought she wanted to become a medical doctor, but the more social sciences courses she took, the more interested she became in issues around

stratification, and the many ways in which inequality manifests itself. She got to know patients and became familiar with the challenges they faced while volunteering at a nursing home and in a psychiatric hospital, but soon realized she didn’t want to provide direct services. “I wanted to create structural change,” recalls Perna, who saw that the opportunity to go to a school like Penn, get a good job, or have a house to live in, shouldn’t be reserved for a lucky few.

“Everyone should have those things. For me, public policy has been the way to figure out how to level the playing field and address structural inequality.”

After college, Perna took a job working for a county government in New Jersey where she saw the impact of local agencies on the lives of residents. While there, she was also introduced to people who worked at a number of local colleges. But it wasn’t until a few years later, as a graduate student at the Ford School of Public Policy, that she realized the power of those initial introductions: every paper she wrote ended up circling back to education.

“Figuring out how to pay for college was an issue that was especially relevant to me and my family,” says Perna, who began to explore the topic more deeply. By the time she enrolled in the CSHPE doctoral program at SOE, financial aid had become one of her main areas of interest.

Today, Perna is the Graduate School of Education Centennial Presidential Professor of Education, Executive Director for the Alliance for Higher Education and Democracy, and Vice Provost for Faculty at her alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania. Perna is one of the few faculty members who has led both of the major scholarly associations affiliated with the study of higher education by serving as the president of the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) and the vice president of the Postsecondary Education Division of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). An internationally renowned scholar, her work has changed scholarship and practice to improve college access for low-income students, firstgeneration students, and students of color.

But in keeping with her mission to create structural change, Perna’s influence extends far beyond the halls of academia.

“I really believe that policy and practice should be informed by data and research, but policymakers are not reading our academic journals,” says Perna. “I think it’s an obligation, especially for people who choose to be in our applied field, to help make that connection.” She has given testimony to the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, and the Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Training for the U.S. House of Representatives. As an expert she has advocated for federal and state policy to provide access to higher education for student populations that have been excluded. In addition to publishing in academic journals, her expertise is often quoted in popular media outlets, from the New York Times to Forbes, and many more.

Understanding the immense value of community partnerships, Perna created an academic-based service-learning course where Penn graduate students can apply college choice and access theory to work in the nonprofit sector of Philadelphia to encourage access to high school students. “Dr. Perna’s connection to practice and policy puts her among the rarest of academics who can engage with communities and make meaningful change in policy, all while producing rigorous and seminal scholarship,” writes a mentee who nominated her for the Distinguished Alumni Award. The nominator, who wasn’t even enrolled at Perna’s institution but came to know her through conferences and professional networks, wrote in awe of Perna’s willingness to help guide him.

“When I was at Michigan in the doctoral program, I was so grateful for the time, care, and attention—the engagement of the faculty there,” recalls Perna. “Joan Stark was on my dissertation committee. At some point when I was close to being done, I remember saying to her ‘What on earth can I do to thank you? You’ve been so helpful.’ And she said, simply, ‘You pay it forward. This is just part of being in this profession.’ It was an explicit way to communicate norms and expectations, and it certainly has stuck with me. Mentoring is so personally gratifying. It’s such a privilege to be part of other people’s journeys.” ■

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r. Lin Chu Wong (AM ’80, PhD ’90) had just sent her eldest child off to college when she returned to school herself. Although she had graduated from Hunter College in 1950, she hadn’t worked in 20 years when she enrolled at the SOE to earn her master’s degree. At age 40, she was older than both her classmates and her advisor, Dr. Gwendolyn Baker, but that didn’t deter her.

As a child growing up during the Depression in New York City, Wong had worked after school in her family’s Chinese laundry. “I was aware of being the only ‘Chinese girl’ in my elementary school and that, unlike the other girls, I lived behind a laundry store,” recalls Wong.

“I felt that I had to overcome both economic and ethnic obstacles. When I recounted taunting, mimicking, and bullying, and as wartime animus against Asians was unleashed, my mother, who had only two years of high school education, and my father who was Englishilliterate, made it clear to me, as well as to my siblings, that I needed to go further.”

Wong became the first in her family to complete college. She married James Wong after his U.S. Navy discharge and helped support him while he pursued his university degree.

They raised four children in Ann Arbor.

Armed with her new teaching certification, Wong began substitute teaching at schools in her neighborhood, then known as East Ann Arbor. When Clinton Elementary School expanded to incorporate students from the burgeoning subsidized housing units in the area, its enrollment leapt from 100 students to 600. Wong interviewed for a full-time position on a Friday, and began teaching her second grade class the follow-

“We all believed that the foundation of educational success was in a progressive elementary school education with a diverse staff and student body.”

“My own experience as the only student of color in most of my New York City classrooms from elementary through college, inspired me to sign up,” Wong says.

The colleagues who joined her shared a similar philosophy. “We all believed that the foundation of educational success was in a progressive elementary school education with a diverse staff and student body.”

Wong taught at Bryant for 20 years. Eventually, moved by the “heady days of the feminist movement,” as she puts it, she wanted to take a stab at being in charge. She became principal of Bader Elementary School, which she was tasked with closing over a two-year period and transitioning the student body to a more integrated school via busing.

While teaching full time, Wong earned

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her PhD. Her dissertation, titled “An Ethnographic Study of Literacy Behaviors in Chinese Families in an Urban School Community,” examined recent Chinese immigrant students in Detroit, and considered the clash between their traditional valuation of education and the reality of their school experiences. The dissertation focused on how the students’ non-English-speaking parents invented teaching strategies and motivated them, and how a more supportive public school system could affect success in an overlooked minority community.

Born out of her personal experience of racism, Wong’s interest in multicultural studies led her to curriculum development.

In 1985, she was selected to serve on the National Education Association’s Curriculum Committee in Washington, DC, where she helped to write a national multicultural curriculum. In 1991, Wong was reunited with her former SOE advisor Gwendolyn Baker, who was now the president of the New York City Board of Education. She invited Wong to contribute her ideas on multicultural teaching at the elementary level in her hometown.

“She knew about my past in a variety of New York City schools,” says Wong of Baker.

“Both of us had experienced segregation and bias, and we exchanged anecdotes of those not-so-far-off, yet still present, times. We agreed that children, in order to invent their own lives, should be motivated in school to examine their heritage and the culture of others. What was unimaginable to a student like me in 1930s New York City was a curriculum telling the story of the many cultures that constitute the richness of the American experience.” Along with Baker, she was able to help formulate just that for a new generation.

Subsequently, Wong was elected to serve three three-year terms on the SOE Alumni Board of Governors. Over the course of her tenure, she worked on issues that included recruitment and retention of minority students and building relationships with Detroit public schools.

“The racism of my youth and the advent of civil rights in the 1960s all added up to the person I became,” says Wong in reflection, “someone inspired to develop studies in diversity and to teach culture and tolerance.” ■

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ing Monday. The school was so crowded, she didn’t even have a classroom; she taught in a hallway, or sometimes, in a storage room.

But she was determined to give her students powerful learning opportunities.

“I found my first teaching experience exciting and empowering,” recalls Wong.

“The students and I were inventing new ways to do school. We shared a spirit of overcoming unfortunate odds, and turned school into an adventure.”

The severe overcrowding led the Ann Arbor School District to open a new school in a rented warehouse, closer to the subsidized housing units. A sign-up sheet for volunteers to transfer went up in the faculty lounge at Clinton. Wong remembers that she was one of the few to add her name.

“Clinton was originally intended to serve families from a middle class, predominantly white community,” she says. But the new school, which would eventually be named Bryant Elementary, would become Ann Arbor’s first open school, and would serve a more diverse, and largely Black, community.

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Growing Economic Opportunity Through Community Colleges

Professor Peter Bahr’s research aims to improve the way community colleges serve the diverse needs of students

“The design of the park suggests a particular use, but the people interacting with the space forge their own paths.”

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cal education fields, and having very high levels of success. But they typically leave college without earning a degree or postsecondary certificate,” Bahr says. Even without a formal credential, though, the students frequently see improvements in their earnings that can be attributed to their studies.

“It’s remarkable in some ways, because our narrative is that people who leave college without completing a degree have dropped out. But of course, in community colleges, it’s so much more complex,” Bahr says.

Bahr likens students carving their own paths through the community college system with “desire lines” carved through the careful landscaping of Central Park in

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encountering obstacles, often unclear about the best path forward,” Bahr says. Describing himself as perpetually curious about the answers to the question “why do people do what they do?”, Bahr notes that community colleges attract people from incredibly different backgrounds with a wide range of goals; they also often offer a less structured environment than four-year colleges, leading to substantial variability in student pathways into, through, and out of the institutions. By deciphering the relationships between students’ motivations, behaviors, and outcomes, his research informs institutional and state policy decisions about how to improve students’ educational and economic opportunities.

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ommunity colleges open doors to economic opportunity and advancement for many students who would otherwise be unable to attend college. But these institutions comprise an educational ecosystem that can be much more complex than the one typically found at four-year universities.

With more than two decades of experience in research on community colleges, Associate Professor Peter Riley Bahr is engaged in several high-profile studies exploring how students are using these colleges and other open-access postsecondary institutions, and how the institutions and state agencies that oversee them can better serve learners by adapting to their demonstrated needs.

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Peter Riley Bahr

Kennan Cepa

Bahr’s research on community colleges stems in part from his personal experience as a community college student. Bahr attended Solano Community College in Fairfield, California, while working nights at a wastewater treatment plant. He completed associate degrees in chemistry and in water and wastewater treatment technology, but had little guidance regarding what to do next.

Ultimately, he found his way to California State University Sacramento as a transfer student, and then was accepted into a PhD program in sociology at the University of California Davis. He ascribes his decision to seek a PhD to a misunderstanding on his part, when he didn’t recognize a professor’s statement that “everyone should get a PhD” was a joke. But this advice proved providential, as it put him on a path to a research role with the state agency overseeing community colleges in California, and from there to faculty positions first at Wayne State University in Detroit, and then in the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education (CSHPE) at the University of Michigan.

“Now I’m seeing that it’s not just my own experience, but that of millions of students navigating their way through the curriculum,

Jennifer May-Trifiletti

Xinye Hu

Bahr’s work is supported by a research team that shares his vision. Dr. Kennan Cepa, Managing Researcher on Bahr’s team, has responsibility for project planning and grant proposals in addition to conducting research.

Jennifer May-Trifiletti, Dr. Xinye Hu, and Rooney Columbus each oversee one or more specific research projects. Sam Kaser, who received his master’s degree from CSHPE and is currently a doctoral student at the University of Iowa, provides research support.

Cepa says that her experience graduating in the midst of the Great Recession deeply informed her perspective on the difficulties of bridging school and work. “Community colleges are such an important linchpin for Americans to get a stable foothold in the precarious economic circumstances that define American life today,” she says.

Skills Builders Bahr’s recent research with doctoral student collaborators Yiran Chen and Rooney Columbus on “skills builder students” was recently accepted for publication in the Journal of Higher Education. “Roughly one in eight students in community colleges are taking just a couple of classes, mostly in career and techni-

Rooney Columbus

Sam Kaser

New York. The design of the park suggests a particular use, but the people interacting with the space forge their own paths.

“Students’ emergent course-taking patterns present the opportunity for the institution to be informed by what users need and are benefiting from,” Bahr says. “Students are able to convert these one or two courses into significant economic returns. The curriculum of the institution can be modified, expanded, developed, refined to serve those needs more directly.” He suggests that colleges could build credential programs based on the combinations of high-return courses that students are taking.

“Think about it like you’re going to the grocery store,” Bahr says. “You’ve just got a little basket, you bought turkey and you bought cheese and you leave. That’s all you wanted.

You didn’t know anything about bread or mustard. If you had realized that you could make a sandwich just by throwing a couple more groceries into your cart, then you would get an additional benefit from your purchase.” Bahr sees an opportunity, then, for institutions to offer a credential as a “full sandwich” by making it easy for skills builder students to access each ingredient in the same educational “aisle,”

with benefits for both the learner in labor market outcomes, and benefits for the college in the tangible measure of graduation rate.

“So now the skills builder student leaves with a certificate that is durable, that goes beyond their immediate educational and economic needs, something that can take them even further, that’s portable, that goes from one college to another.”

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Community Colleges and Career and Technical Centers In examining the community college system, Bahr is also interested in lessons from other sub-baccalaureate programs, especially the state of Ohio’s successful career and technical centers (CTCs). CTCs appear to have better graduation and employment rates than community colleges. Bahr and his team, in collaboration with colleagues at Miami University and Xavier University, set out to discover whether the apparent advantages of CTCs over comparable community colleges hold up under scrutiny and, if so, how the community college model of career and technical education might be adapted to better serve students.

“Our preliminary evidence suggests that the differences in outcomes between career and technical centers and community colleges are not solely a result of differences in the student body. Moreover, the credentials offered by career and technical centers appear to be worth at least as much as comparable certificates from community colleges in terms of earnings gains,” Bahr says.

“That’s pretty exciting because it says there is another model for delivering education in these career and technical centers that we can learn from, and that doesn’t come at the cost of the value of the credentials.

“What we’re finding is fascinating,” he continues. “For the longest time, we thought the best way to make community college work well was to make it maximally flexible.

You make it as flexible as possible, especially for adult learners who are juggling kids, jobs, and so on.” Ohio’s technical centers, though, do the opposite. A student hoping to earn a certificate from a community college may know the classes they need to take, but those classes may be stretched out over multiple semesters or scheduled at

times that don’t fit the lives of adult learners balancing work, family care, and the like.

But students in a career and technical center enter as part of a cohort and complete their coursework in a predictable, structured time frame, for a set cost. “That seems to actually serve some segments of the adult learner population better because it takes all of the question marks out of it. The predictability makes it possible for students to restructure

The goal is to create paths that build from a lowerlevel credential with a meaningful economic benefit

their employment, continue in school and achieve their goals,” Bahr says. “That’s the interest in stackability, creating ladders of credentials that allow people to advance their economic opportunities progressively, as opposed to waiting four or five years to complete a degree to secure the economic benefits of their education.”

“We’ve identified stackable credentials pathways as a promising way to help lowincome students move into a middle income wage and life,” says Jennifer May-Trifiletti, the Research Lead for the stackable credentials project. “The focus of our project is explicitly on promoting equity by identifying the barriers that hinder access to stackable credential pathways for low-income students, specifically barriers that institutions and state policymakers have some control over so that they can make these pathways more accessible and beneficial for low-income students.”

Building Systems that Serve Students

up to higher levels with greater economic returns. their lives for a short time to achieve their educational goals.” Bahr also noted that instructors at CTCs are often working in or recently retired from the occupation they’re teaching, and that proximity to the industry means they know what students need to learn to be successful in their jobs.

Stackable Credentials Bahr and his team, in partnership with Lindsay Daugherty and Peter Nguyen at RAND, are also studying stackable credentials as a path toward economic opportunity.

“For a significant fraction of students, it’s not feasible to just go full time at a university,” Bahr says. The goal is to create paths that build from a lower-level credential with a meaningful economic benefit up to higher levels with greater economic returns.

“That sort of a stacking gives students the on-ramps and off-ramps that they need to get immediate economic gains, secure

Bahr and his research team rely on strong partnerships with the states and institutions they are studying. “We aim to leverage the data that states share with us to answer the questions that will help our partners understand what’s happening in their systems and determine how to better support their students, in addition to advancing knowledge for the larger community of researchers and scholars,” Cepa says.

Because community colleges are more likely than four-year colleges to serve economically marginalized students, students of color, and adults returning to further their education, Bahr and his colleagues take seriously their role and responsibility in improving access to higher education.

“You can see that central to our work really is serving students who have limited or minimal economic opportunities,” Bahr says.

“Higher education opens doors to advance beyond whatever your socioeconomic background might be or whatever your parents may have achieved. You can go further.

You can climb higher. That’s the promise of America.” ■

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C o m “We’re seizing the opportunity presented by these interacting presses on schools and districts by supporting them in addressing the needs and aspirations of students. And we’re taking it as a chance to leverage information technologies—to connect educational professionals, parents, families, community members, and other stakeholders—and collectively develop the capabilities needed to respond to the moment positively,” says Peurach.

The demand for virtual continuing education was already evident. Since its launch in 2016, the SOE’s popular MicroMasters program, Leading Educational Innovation and Improvement, has attracted tens of thousands of participants. The MicroMasters program engages learners in five online courses focused on educational innovation and improvement, with a specific focus on the principles and application of Improvement Science. These courses can be used by

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rom teaching through the pandemic, to advancing equity and inclusion, to making new and creative use of information technologies—educators in the U.S. and around the world are being tasked with adapting their practice to address the ever-evolving needs of students. In response, Professor Don Peurach says there is a strong need for public institutions like the University of Michigan to support local communities and school districts in making advances to meet the moment.

This year, the SOE is launching the EdHub for Community and Professional Learning, a center of primarily online learning opportunities for families, community advocates, educators, and policymakers. The mission of the EdHub is to catalyze a global community committed to ensuring that all students experience the joy, power, and love of learning.

practicing teachers, leaders, and reformers to advance their current knowledge and earn a certificate, providing a path to an accelerated master’s degree on the UM-Ann Arbor campus. Building on the success of the MicroMasters, organizers hoped to turn their attention next to developing an online community.

In November 2020, following a charge from Dean Elizabeth Moje, a team of SOE faculty, doctoral candidates, and staff in the Center for Education Design, Evaluation, and Research (CEDER) began to think about how the SOE could serve more people through virtual learning than it has historically. Over the course of a six-month ideation phase, the team conducted market and competitor scans, design challenges, external consultations with the Center for Academic Innovation, and internal litmus tests with SOE leaders, faculty, and staff. The result was the development of a comprehensive

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16 architecture for “stackable” open-access and certificate-granting public and professional learning opportunities.

Now housed on the SOE’s website (soe. umich.edu/edhub), the EdHub hosts a library of offerings. These include live and recorded virtual events, open-access courses available to the public at no cost, and certificate-granting professional development courses for educators who hold teaching certification.

The first piece of content EdHub organizers developed was in response to a request from the state of Michigan. When schools pivoted to virtual instruction in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, “it changed the modality for teachers and learners across the United States,” says Alison Diefenderfer, Instructional Designer for the EdHub. The shift laid bare inequities that had long existed across the educational system.

“What we are going to do is reach out and encourage people to connect with us, to take up a social challenge, which is developing capabilities around the world to advance access, quality, and equity in public education.”

In response, the SOE partnered with Michigan State University and Michigan Virtual to create a suite of free online professional development (PD) courses focused on inclusive teaching and learning. Made possible through funding from the Governor’s Emergency Education Relief Fund, the PD was developed collaboratively by U-M faculty and local K-12 teachers with the aim of understanding and advancing equity in remote and hybrid learning settings arising from COVID-19. Intended to provide training on research-based practices and strategies, the four courses (AntiRacist Trauma-Informed Practice in PreK-12 Education; Equity in Online Learning for Multilingual Students; Inquiry-Based Learning in Secondary Mathematics Education; and Inquiry-Based Learning in Secondary Science Education) each consisted of 8-10 hours of asynchronous learning for teachers. Participa-

tion was free, and Michigan educators could use the courses to earn required continuing education credits (SCECHs).

Although the suite of PDs was developed in 2021, the offerings remain accessible through Michigan Virtual’s platform, and are also available on the EdHub website. Austin Peters (AM ’21, TeachCert ’21), who was hired as an ESL teacher in the Woodhaven Brownstown School District last September, took one of the courses in January 2022. He started with the district a few weeks into the semester, and had missed some professional development hours. While searching for virtual courses to catch up on SCECHs, the equity PD caught his eye. “I happened to notice the Equity in Online Learning for Multilingual Students course in the list of offerings and thought that would serve me well as an ESL teacher,” he wrote to the SOE. “Quickly I recognized familiar faces on the slide presentation videos. So thanks again! It seems I still have more to learn from your classes!”

“The university as a whole is striving to be a world leader in online education,” says Peurach. “U-M has a vast alumni base. We know there are people out there who like to connect with us and stay with us. What makes us unique as a new unit in a school of education at a public university is this commitment to egalitarian imperatives. What we are going to do is reach out and encourage people to connect with us, to take up a social challenge, which is developing capabilities around the world to advance access, quality, and equity in public education.”

In the fall of 2022, the EdHub will launch “Transforming Education in an Interconnected World,” a series of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) funded by the Center for Academic Innovation. The aim of the series is threefold: to draw a diverse array of educational stakeholders into community; to establish a common framework for understanding and pursuing the transformation

of public education in the United States and other national contexts; and to serve both as an intellectual foundation and recruiting mechanism for continuing public and professional learning opportunities being developed and offered by the EdHub. The MOOC series will run in tandem with a “teach out-like” Community Engagement series launched in spring 2022 that shares the same three aims. Together, the MOOC series and the Community Engagement series will form what organizers call “the EdHub Backbone.”

The Community Engagement series will include town halls, policy forums, and mini-conferences. Its inaugural event took place in April 2022 when the EdHub hosted a town hall, “The Teacher Shortage in Michigan: Framing Challenges, Envisioning Solutions.” Calling together multiple perspectives including a parent organizer, a union representative, an administrator, a state legislator, and the SOE’s own Dean Moje, the panel explored how schools state- and nationwide are addressing the challenge of retaining and recruiting teachers. They also discussed the repercussions this issue presents for families and communities beyond the walls of the classroom.

After attending the town hall, Scott Cochran, an elementary school principal in Midland, Michigan, wrote to share his appreciation. “As a current principal, former teacher, and University of Michigan graduate, I found it exciting to hear from Dr. Peurach and the other panelists regarding real, common-sense solutions to one of our most pressing current challenges in public education. I’ve often felt like I wanted to connect with other leaders in education who could help us address challenges, but didn’t know how to make that happen.”

The Community Engagement series continued in May as Clinical Associate Professor Liz Kolb, along with Kristin Fontichiaro, a clinical professor in the School of Information, convened the Digital Wellness Symposium.

This event, geared toward 6th, 7th, 8th graders and their parents or guardians, called together 40 pairs of two-person teams (a student plus a parent/guardian) for a morning of learning, conversation, and activities about healthy online behaviors. Convened on Zoom, this interactive community event included a

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keynote address by Diana Graber, author of Raising Humans in a Digital World: Helping Kids Build a Healthy Relationship with Technology, respective activities for the children and adults, as well as at-home conversation prompts and challenge activities for the pairs to complete together.

As the EdHub’s presence is built out, it will grow to offer more online, in-person, and hybrid learning experiences, attracting audiences who are committed to advancing educational access, quality, and equity in public education. The goal of the EdHub is to empower a global community of educational difference-makers with continuing education credits, certificates, and micro-credentials that recognize and elevate their capabilities to lead innovation and improvement in their classrooms, schools, districts, and communities.

“I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for designing the MicroMasters Program for us, educators all over the world, who are looking for innovation and improvement in education in the face of the rapid changes in the 21st century,” wrote Brenda Wong, a veteran history teacher in Hong Kong, via email. “Even though I’m an experienced teacher, I was so lost in the face of the ongoing online lessons caused by COVID-19 in 2020. I lost my confidence in teaching. I knew the traditional teaching pedagogy could no longer fit my kids, and I was looking for a course to advance my teaching. I searched local universities and didn’t find any

professional development course—affords the EdHub team an opportunity to consider how they might scale the content for future users: “You’re already building with your 2.0 or your 3.0 template in mind.” Taking audience and user feedback into consideration at every step, she says, opens up new lines of inquiry for instructional design, as well as new ways to connect with an ever-expanding audience.

“We’re seeing more and more learners engage each month,” says Diefenderfer. “The topics and themes and the types of questions that come from the audience provide opportunities for new learning nodes that may or may not have been on our radar before. Are there things we can leverage?

And likewise, we may have clusters in those audiences to then engage with further.” She also notes that in designing the EdHub, the team is focused on universal design—an approach that centers accessibility for all types of learners. “We’re looking for those opportunities where we’re finding an audience, a purpose, and a possible modality for different ways of engagement.”

In a crowded virtual space, where many institutions are targeting potential users, Peurach is clear that the greatest benefit of the EdHub is its community—a roster of individuals who seek access to the resources that will further their own education to make education itself equitable.

“This movement orientation is what will distinguish us,” says Peurach. “We want to draw in other organizations that are doing similar work, with the same egalitarian commitments, and act as a connective tissue to stitch together a broad network that can support folks in learning to do this work.”

Organizers of the EdHub hope to attract a broad range of interested learners—everyone from education professors to the “education curious.” “We want people who want to run for school board, people who want to elevate their role,” says Peurach. In order to encourage and support a general public that wishes to deepen its commitment to today’s students, and help create change in public education, he says, “there need to be learning opportunities that put everybody on the same page.” ■

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“We want to draw in other organizations that are doing similar work, with the same egalitarian commitments, and act as a connective tissue to stitch together a broad network that can support folks in learning to do this work.”

responsive courses focusing on ‘education innovation and improvement.’ At last, I found this program. I’ve learned so much throughout all courses.”

“The idea of providing asynchronous teaching and learning for professional development—on demand—is huge,” says Diefenderfer. She speaks from personal experience. Prior to her work as an instructional designer she taught in the virtual classroom: “A lot of my years teaching I was part-time at multiple institutions. I did my professional development whenever I could find an opportunity.” As Diefenderfer helps design the EdHub’s platform, she is thinking about the various types of learners around the world who are at different stages of their professional journey—whether they’re looking to pivot to teaching, or they’ve been working in education and seek an opportunity to advance their career, or they are parents who helped their kids learn through the pandemic, and now want to take a more active role in the field of education. “The multiple modalities of engagement, multiple types of panels and tracks and possibilities for learning sequences—that’s what I’m most excited about.”

As the EdHub launches this spring, EdHub project manager Ariel Mallett reflects on the work that has gone into making the platform’s offerings available. “It’s an iterative process.

The EdHub looks very different today than it did [in its planning stage] a year ago. And it’ll look different again a year from now.” As the EdHub team collaborates with faculty who have experience in open access and online education, and professional development education, Mallett says the goal is to create a virtual experience that truly feels like the SOE. Diefenderfer notes that every new offering —whether it’s a panel discussion, or a

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Robots Bring Math and Engineering Lessons to Life A peek inside Isra Elshafei’s robotics class at The School at Marygrove

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he first thing you notice when you walk into Isra Elshafei’s robotics class is that it doesn’t feel like your run-of-the-mill high school classroom. Instead of desks, there are workbenches, each featuring a big, yellow, retractable power outlet hanging overhead.

The workbenches are stacked with electronics components and small, four-wheeled robots.

A mysterious x-y-z axis is mapped out in blue tape on the floor. At the back of the room—illuminated by a border of flashing red, blue, and green LEDs— is the “recharge station”: a cozy spot with comfy chairs where students can take time to relax before or after class. Displayed on the wall of the recharge station is a reproduction of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks—but with robots replacing Hopper’s regular diner customers.

Elshafei (who her students refer to as “Ms. Isra,” or more cheekily, “Ms. Izzy”) is in her first year as a teaching resident at The School at Marygrove (TSM). TSM hosts the School of Education’s Teaching School, where undergraduate and graduate students in the teacher education program learn to use projectbased, student-centered approaches by teaching alongside one another as well as expert teachers and university-based teacher educators. Once certified, they are hired at TSM as “teaching residents.” As residents, they teach independently, but remain a part of an intergenerational team

that includes expert teachers as supervisors and mentors, and undergraduate mentees.

“This is my first time having my own classroom,” Elshafei says, “and I’m figuring out how to navigate that. However, I’ve been with this group of students since their freshman year. I did my observation time with them [which was in-person before the pandemic], and I did my student teaching with the same group. Now they’re my actual students!”

Elshafei’s robotics course is for 11th graders, and is part of TSM’s Human Centered Design and Engineering (HCD+E) curriculum. As a STEMfocused school, each year students at TSM from 9th through 12th grade will take the HCD+E course, which serves as a foundation for the academic work they do as they progress through high school.

Elshafei brings a background in computer programming and a teaching endorsement in mathematics to her instruction. “At this point in the year, we’ve done a lot of programming,” Elshafei says. “We’ve coded a facial recognition system, as well as worked on some mathematics.

We’re also working on building robots.”

The course was designed by an interdisciplinary team of faculty and staff from the School of Education and College of Engineering, and teachers at TSM, including Elshafei herself.

The curriculum was inspired by the College of Engineering’s Robotics 101 course, a class designed to teach foundational engineering skills.

“A lot of kids think ‘why do I even need math?’ This is an example. Students are actually able to see it in action. Especially if you’re interested in getting into the engineering field, math is going to come up, and this is how.”

headquarters in Ann Arbor, which opened in November 2021. Funding from the KLA Foundation has provided computers, tools, materials, and volunteer support for both TSM’s burgeoning robotics club and Elshafei’s new robotics class. Working with these components is a key part of the curriculum and central to students’ learning experience.

“With the robot,” Elshafei explains, “I was able to tie it into our math unit. These robots are supposed to be line-following robots. The goal, once we get these robots running, is to create vectors for the robots to follow—that’s also why we have an x-y-z axis taped out on the floor.”

Elshafei’s students—she has around 18–20 in each of her four sections—are an animated, enthusiastic bunch. While

Michigan. We’re hoping to plan a field trip to actually see the robot in action.”

Cassie belongs to Michigan Robotics, one of the top-ranked academic research labs devoted to two-legged robots in the world.

Cassie, a tough, light, bipedal robot with “eyes,” walks at 11 different gaits forward and backw­ard, 11 sideways gaits, and 11 different gaits for slopes. Loosely modeled on the cassowary, a flightless bird similar to an ostrich, Cassie’s legs have backward-facing knees and attach to a short torso that holds batteries, motors, and computation equipment.

Elshafei has also found some unexpected learning opportunities in her classroom this year. “At the start of the school year, there were quite a few students who didn’t know their way around the laptops we use in class as much as I expected them to. I think that

because it’s us exploring together. We’re going to try this whether it works or it doesn’t.”

When asked if her students were comfortable working on problems where the solution wasn’t always clear, “absolutely,” she says immediately. “At the start of the school year, we did a whole activity on the mindset that we want to go into the school year with. Especially because at the start of year we worked with coding, and coding can get very frustrating for folks, especially if it doesn’t work right away. We worked on this mindset of, ‘Okay, we’re going to run into issues—a lot. How do we approach that?

How do we handle that? How do we seek support when we run into those challenges?’

Ever since then, I feel like it’s been pretty easy.

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just goes to show how our phones have become more relevant than actual computers.

So breaking that down and trying to explain interfaces and concepts like that was new information for a lot of students.” In fact, phones now play a legitimate role in the classroom. “The robots will actually end up being controlled by their phones. The robots have a camera attached to them, and they’ll be able to see what the robot sees.”

For the lesson Elshafei just completed, she was working with students on how to solve a software problem with the robot’s computer “brain.” It was a workaround that involved downloading software onto a USB card, inserting it into the robot, and connecting it to students’ phones. The project involved several levels of problem solving both for teacher and students.

Elshafei explains: “The one thing I’ve always been with the kids in here is honest.

Anytime we’ve run into issues, I’ll say ‘You know what, we ran into another issue. We’re all going try the solution together’ like we did today. We’re going to see how it goes.

That’s one thing I really appreciate about the kids here. They’re always very willing,

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students often become deeply engaged in the building aspect of robotics, the collegelevel math can be quite challenging. “The idea is to make it clear that when you’re creating robots, math is a key component.

A lot of kids think ‘why do I even need math?’ This is an example. Students are actually able to see it in action. Especially if you’re interested in getting into the engineering field, math is going to come up, and this is how.

“It’s been interesting to navigate this space,” Elshafei continues, “because there are quite a few students who may not really be that interested in engineering, so I try to tie engineering to other fields, specifically with the robots. At the start of the school year, I had them do an exploration of a field that they are interested in and see how robots appear in that field—whether it be medicine or cosmetology. It’s being used everywhere.

It’s so cool, being able to tie that in.”

For one of Elshafei’s last projects of the year, she is planning on taking further advantage of TSM’s connection to U-M. “What we’ll be doing will be in partnership with the Cassie robot at the University of

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The curriculum focuses on learning objectives such as algebraic reasoning, computer programming, building and interacting with robots, and computational thinking.

“I did a lot of the work for the actual lesson plans. It’s been both difficult and exciting, because I was taking on a little more than I had initially expected. However, it’s been really fun being able to say, ‘I helped design this curriculum,’ and to get into the details of every class period trying to think about what my kids need to know in order to fully understand these concepts.”

The equipment the class is using—robot kits, Raspberry Pi computers, multimeters, and development kits—are not what some may expect to find in a typical high school classroom. Indeed, this class would not be possible in its current form without some extra help, which is being provided by the KLA Foundation. The KLA Corporation, a global technology company that develops industry-leading equipment and services for the manufacturing of semiconductors, is based in Milpitas, CA, but has locations around the world—including a second

A Systemic Solution to the Michigan Teacher Shortage

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SOE’s Michigan Alternate Route to Certification expands its program to create the Initial Certification Pathway

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ccording to the Michigan Education Association, it is estimated that up to 10,000 teachers are leaving their jobs in Michigan each year and only 5,000 are entering the field in their place. The shortage of qualified teachers was a concern before the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in urban and rural communities and in certain subject areas, and has only intensified in the past two years.

Recruiting teachers has become a focus for school districts, educator preparation programs, state legislators, and the Department of Education.

As policymakers urgently implement stopgap measures to ensure that schools have enough

M-ARC also offers a pathway to additional endorsement for experienced educators to earn certification in other content areas without leaving the classroom. It addresses the teacher shortage by providing more flexibility among existing teaching staff in schools and districts.

M-ARC’s new Initial Certification Pathway allows Michigan residents with a bachelor’s degree to get their teaching certification without prior classroom experience. “Our mission [at M-ARC] is to prepare individuals throughout Michigan to be highly qualified teachers for Michigan students and to open access to the teaching profession for people who may not be able to participate in a

adults in classrooms to stay open, the SOE is focused on expanding pathways to bring new educators into the profession and preparing them to be effective and impactful in the important work of teaching children and youth.

The SOE now offers three pathways to teacher certification: a bachelor’s degree with certification beginning in the third year of an undergraduate sequence, a master’s degree with certification that is completed in one year, and a new alternate route to certification for candidates who already hold a bachelor’s degree at minimum.

The new non-degreed certification route is an expansion of the SOE’s successful Michigan Alternate Route to Certification (M-ARC). M-ARC builds on its success in preparing and certifying hundreds of teachers in the last 12 years, positively affecting students’ lives throughout the metro Detroit area. The program began as a partnership with Teach For America-Detroit by providing the teacher preparation program for its corps members to hold the certification required to teach in Michigan schools.

traditional bachelor’s or master’s program,” says M-ARC Associate Director Jean Mrachko.

In this program, candidates begin with a pre-service induction period that includes self-paced online coursework—with an average duration of five months—and a practicum experience working with children in an educational setting. Teaching experiences structured to gradually increase the candidates’ level of responsibility begin with 1-1 teaching to develop skills such as eliciting student thinking, getting to know learners, and understanding student misconceptions. The candidates move to small group teaching before being in classrooms full time.

Kendra Hearn, Associate Dean for Undergraduate and Teacher Education, has directed M-ARC since its founding. She explains that M-ARC’s pre-service program intentionally connects coursework and fieldwork (sometimes called “clinical experience”), and how this is a critical element of the program design: “Through asynchronous online coursework, candidates receive knowledge about core teaching practices; then they are asked to process

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orn and raised in Detroit, Mojoko Esu graduated from Howard University in 2018 with a bachelor’s degree in psychology. After graduation, she accepted a position with Teach For America and was part of the M-ARC program; she is currently a sixth grade teacher at Brenda Scott Academy for Theatre Arts in Detroit.

“Programs of this nature and caliber are more important now than ever before,” Esu says. “Teacher shortages were rampant pre-pandemic and the vacancies have continued rising at exponential rates across the state ever since. All children deserve a well-rounded education from quality educators who have the passion, proper training, and tools to be highly effective. M-ARC helps to make that possible by providing diversified tools and continuous training to those who may not have taken the traditional route to teaching but who have the passion for serving students and families now.”

For many participants, an alternative route to the certification program allows for a career change and the ability to bring extensive real-life experiences into the classroom.

High school advisor David Vidal-Jones, who teaches Hispanic culture and languages, has transitioned from college to high school teaching.

M-ARC has helped him reach the certification goal, broadening his teaching range.

of backgrounds, the program is a timely asset that can be a part of a creative solution to address teacher shortages.”

“Professionals and graduates inspired by the call of teaching need a program that supports their needs and realities as Michiganders,” he says.

“M-ARC provides that and the expansion of the program to younger generations of graduated professionals will fill the shortage of teachers’ gap, as the new teachers will learn and mature in the classrooms, learning by experiencing hands-on teaching every day.”

For Brennah Donahue, a third grade teacher at Escuela Avancemos! Academy in Southwest Detroit, M-ARC invites people who may not have initially considered education as a career to become involved.

“Besides allowing individuals to enter the field of teaching, bringing with them unique assets as they come from a variety of backgrounds, the program is a timely asset that can be part of a creative solution to address teacher shortages,” she says.

Program leaders and alumni alike see the new M-ARC pathway as part of a systemic solution to teacher shortages around the state. “People are being placed in classrooms with no education or support because it’s a crisis,” Hearn says. “Our intention is to create a program that districts can leverage to place committed community members in schools and help them develop their skills and expertise as classroom teachers.”

Further, Hearn aspires to keep teachers in the classroom through robust mentorship. “M-ARC has an excellent record of retention. The research shows that being well prepared and having professional supports encourage teachers to stay in the classroom. It’s also better for students and families when teachers persist in this complex and fascinating profession,” says Hearn. ■

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what they learned and make connections to their clinical experiences through synchronous sessions.”

Hearn adds that clinical experiences are an important space for introducing and developing habits of minds that form the foundation of inclusive teaching practices. Says Hearn: “Developing teachers capable of delivering equitable and socially just educational opportunities for all students begins with helping our candidates confront their own assumptions, identify and operationalize ways of thinking, and recognize children as whole human beings. These habits are at the core of trauma-informed practice and supporting the social-emotional learning of students.”

Once the pre-service induction is complete, candidates can start teaching under a Michigan interim teaching certificate. Then, for their first three years in the classroom, they receive ongoing, practice-focused, content-specific preparation and development to earn their Michigan standard teaching certificate.

“What stands out in this alternate route is the three years of support,” says M-ARC Program Manager Karen Young. “When forming teachers, we’re not just sitting in the background while you’re teaching.

We are there with you, partnering in your classroom.”

As the first cohort of teacher candidates in the new pathway begins its pre-service induction, other M-ARC graduates applaud the program expansion as a way to recruit new teachers into the profession who bring with them valuable experiences in and out of classroom settings.

Interested?

Candidates can apply directly through the M-ARC website soe.umich.edu/m-arc or request information by email at m-arcprogram@umich.edu.

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New Gifts, Endowments, and Bequests R

oger Ehrenberg (BBA ’87) and Carin Levine Ehrenberg (AB ’88) have established the Ehrenberg Fund for LEAPS, which will provide flexible support for the SOE’s new undergraduate major: Learning, Equity, and Problem Solving (LEAPS) for the Public Good. The Ehrenbergs’ generous contribution marks the first gift to the SOE’s new program.

The support it provides will cover initial expenses for infrastructure, student scholarships, or other needs deemed critical by the dean to ensure a successful launch of LEAPS. Carin Levine Ehrenberg, who currently serves on the Dean’s Advisory Council (DAC), met her future husband, Roger, while a student at U-M. At the time, both were close to finishing their degrees—she in psychology, he in business. Thirty-five years later, their reverence for the institution, and their shared love of Ann Arbor, remains strong—and they’ve passed it on to their sons, both of whom were eager to attend U-M for college.

“Being part of the SOE DAC means so much to me as someone who is passionate about engaged learning, the importance of wonderful teachers, and who cares about all children having access to the kind of education we were able to provide to our sons. It also is important to both Roger and me that

we can support this work at our alma mater with the wonderful leadership of Dean Moje, who we are inspired by, and who we consider a friend,” says Carin.

“We have spent our last 10-15 years as Michigan alums finding ways to give back to the university, and we also sit on other boards and are involved across the university. All of our gifts support learning, growing, diversity, and inclusion.”

Although neither of the Ehrenbergs attended the SOE as students themselves, Carin says they are both strong believers in the importance of education “helping to grow meaningful, active, and engaged lifelong learners.” Her hope is that their gift will inspire others to support the SOE.

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oan Eames (AM ’68) of Naples, Florida recently established the Peter and Mary L. Mahonchak Endowed Scholarship Fund, which will provide support to secondary teacher education students in the SOE who intend to teach in a STEM field. Eames’ professional teaching career spanned nearly 40 years, including over three decades as a reading specialist for students in elementary through high school. Eames established this scholarship fund in honor of her parents, Peter and Mary L. Mahonchak, who instilled in her the value of hard work and a good education; they suggested that she pursue a career in teaching.

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OE Professor and Assistant Dean Henry Meares established The Meares Scholars Fund, which will support current and future undergraduate and graduate students who are pursuing a degree or certification from the SOE. In particular, Meares wishes to reduce the barriers to entry into the school, covering the costs associated with either applying to or matriculating into the school.

This fund was created to reduce disparities in education access by providing resources for students who might not otherwise have the financial support needed to pursue an education at the SOE. The focus of this fund is to promote the values of diversity and inclusion by encouraging the admission and funding of students who, for example, have financial need, come from minority-serving institutions, or otherwise represent a broad array of life experiences and perspectives. These students’ participation enhances the quality of the intellectual environment for all students.

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gift from the estate of John H. and Patricia W. Mitchell was given to establish an endowed fund named The John H. and Patricia W. Mitchell Fund for Arts, Media, and Communication Studies, which will support students and faculty who are studying and developing approaches to building robust arts, media, and communications programs

The Ehrenberg family

“Being part of the SOE DAC means so much to me as someone who is passionate about engaged learning, the importance of wonderful teachers, and who cares about all children having access to the kind of education we were able to provide to our sons.” Carin Levine Ehrenberg

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arbara A. Palmer (ABEd ’64, TeachCert ’64, AMLS ’68) of Batavia, Illinois recently established the Barbara Longon Yaney Palmer Scholarship Fund, which will provide support to elementary and secondary teacher education students. During her 25-year career, Palmer served as a teacher and librarian for K-12 students in Indianapolis, Indiana; Wayne, Michigan; Lubbock, Texas; and Naperville, Illinois. She established this scholarship in honor of her parents, Jean Wetherell Longon and J. Russell Longon, and her late husband, Joseph P. Yaney (AB ’61, JD ’64, MBA ’64, PhD ’69), all of whom provided her with support during her undergraduate and graduate studies.

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here are many ways to contribute to the School of Education.

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In recent years, Barbara and her husband, Roger, have enjoyed returning to Ann Arbor for Maize and Blue weekends. Roger loves to count the “Go Blue!” greetings he gets when he wears his Michigan hat, even thousands of miles away from Ann Arbor. Roger and Barbara look forward to meeting the deserving and motivated scholarship recipients: “This is the best way to give back. We wish them all great success as they work with the next generation of students.”

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esley (AB ’92) and Thomas Slatkin have established the Slatkin Family Detroit P-20 Partnership Fund. This fund will support critical needs related to the Detroit P-20 Partnership, including efforts to create empowering educational experiences for Detroit children, youth, teachers, and leaders engaged in the partnership.

“I was looking for a personal way to give back to the university,” Lesley says. “After graduating from Michigan, I went to work for Teach for America and, of course, believe there is no more important profession than teaching. I was inspired to support the School of Education’s work in Detroit because without teachers there are no future students. I was also compelled to give to areas within the university that are not as well-funded as others. My family and I look forward to seeing this program grow and are proud to make an investment in both the University of Michigan and Detroit.”

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he Florence M. Steinberg Scholarship Fund was established by generous friends and family in memory of the late Florence Steinberg (ABEd ’73,TeachCert ’73, AM ’80) of Huntington Woods,

Online: leadersandbest.umich.edu Phone: 1.888.518.7888 Mail: Office of Development and Alumni Relations, School of Education 610 East University Ave. Ann Arbor, MI 48109 Checks payable to: Regents of the University of Michigan.

Indicate how you would like your gift used in the comments

The Slatkin family

Michigan, who passed away in 2021. Steinberg was a longtime reading specialist and elementary school teacher in the Detroit area. The new scholarship fund will provide need-based support to elementary teacher education students in the SOE. Joel Steinberg (BS ’73), her husband, says: “Florence lived a life of many loves: creating them, finding them, engaging in them, none of which surpassed her love of children, and all the education and practice it required to sustain and develop that love. She would be elated to know that the scholarship serves to facilitate and inspire the training of elementary school teachers, ensuring the future of quality elementary school education.” ■

Please reach out to discuss your philanthropic goals with us.

Krissa Rumsey Director, Office of Development 734.763.4880 rumseyk@umich.edu leadersandbest.umich.edu

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at the university’s partnership school in Detroit, The School at Marygrove. The goal of the fund is to assist in teaching youth and their teachers how to use arts and media to communicate with power, artistry, and precision.

John Mitchell was an entertainment industry executive who served as president of Columbia Pictures television division from 1968 to 1977. Under his leadership, more than 100 television programs were produced, including The Flintstones and Bewitched. He also produced the five-time Emmywinning movie Brian’s Song. Mitchell went on to serve three terms as president of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, beginning in the early 1980s.

As a proud alumnus, Mitchell recognized the powerful role his U-M education played in preparing him for his own successful career in the entertainment industry. A trustee of the Mitchells’ estate says the couple wanted to give that same power to future generations of brilliant and creative minds.

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Uniting Research and Practice for Students and their Teachers The Eileen Lappin Weiser Learning Sciences Center seeks to make meaningful learning experiences accessible to all children and youth

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hildren should be at the center of education. That belief was what first motivated Eileen Lappin Weiser to get involved in education policy in the 1990s.

During her 16 years on the State Board of Education, she chaired the State Board’s Legislative Committee, served on the Task Force on Ensuring Excellent Educators and the Governor’s 21st Century Education Commission, and participated in National Association of State Boards of Education study groups on Teacher Coordination and Accountability. Lappin Weiser was appointed by the U.S. Secretary of Education to serve two terms on the National Assessment Governing Boards (NAGB) and served as a board member of The Fund for Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE). She served as the Governor’s proxy for the Education Commission of the States and Midwest Higher Education Compact. She currently is a board member of the Michigan Science Center and the Michigan Association of Public School Academies (MAPSA), and is serving as Chair of the Presidential Scholars Commission.

With a $14.7 million gift, Lappin Weiser is establishing The Eileen Lappin Weiser Learning Sciences Center at the SOE. Her gift represents the largest commitment in the school’s 100-year history.

When Lappin Weiser reflects on decades supporting—and often leading—initiatives aimed at improving the quality of education in our state and nation, she recognizes the status quo is a powerful antagonist. She knows that even when most people express a desire for change, achieving it is where progress tends to stall. But Lappin Weiser believes that students and their teachers deserve better, and her new gift to the SOE is a big step in that direction.

With a $14.7 million gift, Lappin Weiser is establishing The Eileen Lappin Weiser Learning Sciences Center at the SOE. Her gift, representing the largest commitment in the school’s 100-year history, will help reshape teaching and learning to meet the needs of all different kinds of learners and prepare them for the jobs of the future.

“Today’s schools struggle to adapt to their learners’ needs. Far too many of our children and youth are falling through the cracks. Every child deserves the chance to learn and prepare well for life,” Lappin Weiser says. “We already know effective educational practices that can change a child’s education, and we find more every year.

It’s time to help schools, teachers, and students do things differently.”

Lappin Weiser believes that students can achieve high academic standards with welltrained teachers using curricula and instructional practices that guide learners to use and grow the knowledge, skills, creativity, and interests that they possess as curious young people. Schools ought to nurture students’ development as problem solvers and critical thinkers—skills that are crucial for success in the workforce, as citizens, and for personal fulfillment in life.

As Lappin Weiser points out, “A kindergartener today will retire in 2081. We are not providing the skill set they need to be successful in all areas of life. The only way we can get to that is to use what children bring into the classroom as the basis for teaching the complete child.” She is fascinated by how people learn and use knowledge. Ultimately, by supporting youth in becoming lifelong learners, she envisions the powerful benefits of a country of learners bringing their skills and expertise to bear on the complicated problems they face.

As a field, learning sciences deepens our understanding of knowledge-building by studying the incredible complexity of learning.

Learning scientists bring into focus the social aspects of learning, the many purposes for

learning, the diverse environments in which learning occurs, and how learners transfer knowledge to novel situations.

The center that Lappin Weiser is founding will strengthen the connections between research and practice by engaging numerous partners to study the many places and ways that learning happens.

This will involve the design and testing of curricula for diverse groups of learners, collaboration with teachers and administrators to promote evidence-based practices, and efforts to scale successful education solutions to be available to all learners.

One example of the powerful child- and youth-centered learning that is missing from most curricula is project-based learning. There is evidence that project-based learning, in which students learn by exploring real-world questions and challenges, results in powerful learning experiences. Relatedly, place-based learning engages students in their physical environments, cultures, histories, and communities. The SOE has been a leader in the study and scalable implementation of project- and place-based education for decades.

“We know how to organize and enact projectand place-based learning opportunities to help children and youth become problem-solvers who

recognize the purpose of their learning,” says SOE Dean Elizabeth Birr Moje. “With the resources of the Eileen Lappin Weiser Learning Sciences Center, U-M can move findings of cutting-edge research into the hands of teachers, school leaders, and policymakers.”

The SOE will engage with teachers, students, families, and school leaders in its research-practice partnerships with The School at Marygrove and the Mitchell-Scarlett-Huron Teaching and Learning Collaborative. Researchers, teachers, and learners will work together to produce new research findings generated from practice. This community-engaged work will shed light on what it takes to successfully bring project- and place-based work to life.

Moje looks with great hope to the promise of the center to effect change for learners everywhere: “The Eileen Lappin Weiser Learning Sciences Center will leverage the best evidence that we have about how the convergence of context, culture, emotion, and cognition impact learning to generate meaningful curricula, engaging tools and technologies, and thoughtful assessments to enhance the learning experience for all people, both in and out of school.” ■

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“We already know effective educational practices that can change a child’s education, and we find more every year.

It’s time to help schools, teachers, and students do things differently.” Eileen Lappin Weiser

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Teaching with Art for Equity UMMA and the SOE work together to tackle art education’s unsettling history

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MMA and SOE hosted their first joint event in fall 2021—a teacher summit in which local educators convened and offered input on how they might use objects in UMMA’s collection as a springboard for their classes and curricula. “ Our hope was that this group would act as a catalyst and start the discussion,” VanderVliet says, “bearing in mind that we didn’t want to predetermine what role they would have before they weighed in.”

The summit, funded by a grant from U-M’s National Center for Institutional

“We’re interested in how experiences with visual art can speak to students’ identities, create community and social bonds, help them explore complex social issues, and be a site for multimodal learning that doesn’t typically happen in the classroom.”

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settings. We’re interested in how experiences with visual art can speak to students’ identities, create community and social bonds, help them explore complex social issues, and be a site for multimodal learning that doesn’t typically happen in the classroom.”

The partnership was established, in part, to grapple with how to speak and teach about UMMA’s current Unsettling Histories exhibit. The exhibit itself was organized as a response to the Museum’s recent acquisition of Titus Kaphar’s Flay (James Madison). Kaphar, a Michigan native who holds an MFA from the Yale School of Art, is an established artist whose work can be seen in museums and galleries throughout the country. His piece, Analogous Colors, was featured on the cover of the June 15, 2020 issue of TIME. In an artist statement, Kaphar explains that his “practice seeks to dislodge history from its status as the ‘past’ in order to unearth its contemporary relevance.”

In Unsettling Histories, students and educators encounter UMMA’s collection of European and American art from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries through the lens of slavery and colonization. The artworks in this exhibition were made almost exclusively by white, male artists who lived in a world shaped by the ideologies of colonial expansion and Western domination. Kaphar’s work is the catalyst for the examination of the unsettling histories that are contained in UMMA’s collection (and in museum collections more broadly) and

analyzes why some stories and histories are prioritized over others.

Leija continues: “Our collaboration is determined to dismantle the barriers that marginalize BIPOC folks in museums and build a true sense of belonging and community for those who have been implicitly and explicitly excluded.”

Grace VanderVliet, UMMA’s Curator for Museum Teaching and Learning, adds that the partnership also hopes to “leverage works of art from UMMA’s collection in order to develop teaching approaches that are just, equitable, and inclusive.”

The collaboration has already begun to work on several projects and imagines a wide array of possibilities where the partnership can have an impact—from the training of museum docents to a reimagined curriculum for preservice educators.

Victoria Shaw, Detroit Schools Partnership Lead, noted that “a key principle of this growing partnership is to center Detroit-based expertise, leadership, and epistemologies while surfacing often-invisible barriers—for example transportation, childcare, scheduling—to genuine collaboration between university and community partners.”

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s has long been the case, arts instruction is far from a given in America’s many underresourced public schools— although it’s not clear how bad the problem actually is, since the last comprehensive national arts education report by the U.S. Department of Education is over 10 years old. In Detroit, for example, roughly half of schools offer no formal instruction in music or art.

Far from the exception, under-resourced schools are now the norm in the United States. According to a 2020 study by The Century Foundation, a majority of school districts in the country—7,224 in total, making up almost two-thirds of all public school students—face a “funding gap” (the amount of school funding needed to bring students up to the nation’s current average outcomes). Unsurprisingly, districts with funding gaps serve a disproportionate number of low-income, Black, and Latinx students.

The issues surrounding arts access and representation that proliferate in underresourced schools are similarly reflected in the arts community itself. Children who are not exposed to the arts and artmaking in school are far less likely to grow up to be artists, continuing a cycle of exclusion and underrepresentation of artists of color while privileging artists from more affluent communities whose work is more likely to end up in galleries and museums.

In an effort to tackle these issues around access, equity, and representation, the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA) and the SOE are developing a unique partnership that focuses on learning through and with art, and applying the art of teaching to the teaching of art.

Jim Leija, UMMA’s Deputy Director for Public Experience and Learning, explains that “this sustained, intentional collaboration between UMMA and the School of Education harnesses our collective resources towards research and practice on how learning through visual arts can advance equity in a variety of educational

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VanderVliet says, “the summit helped UMMA consider exhibitions and objects in light of curricular connections, how gallery teaching pedagogy relates to classroom practices, and how teaching with art can move us toward equitable approaches in thinking about and framing history and literacy.”

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ollowing the teacher summit, VanderVliet and Cheyenne Fletcher, UMMA’s K-12 Education Coordinator, visited Ms. Kim Hildebrandt-Hall’s Figure Drawing Class at the Detroit School of Arts (DSA)—a fine and performing arts high school that offers a strong college preparatory academic and arts curriculum. The visit was in preparation for her students’ field trip to view the Unsettling Histories exhibit. VanderVliet and Fletcher discussed with students how art can encourage conversations about self-representation, tough-but-real history, and land relationships.

In addition, Yvette Rock, an artist-inresidence at DSA who holds an MFA from U-M and is the founder of Live Coal Gallery in Detroit, worked over several weeks with Hildebrandt-Hall’s students to study other pieces by Kaphar, touching on themes, media, techniques, and social justice concerns.

Rock explains that she “wanted this project to demonstrate that creating access points to art, artists, art-making processes, art spaces, and the sharing and ownership of art can create a healthy and vibrant art ecosystem for those whose personhood and art would normally be ignored, disregarded, and undervalued.”

Students created several projects of their own using similar techniques to Kaphar to explore and express their own concerns, commitments, and identities. Rock took a series of photo portraits of the students, which they used in various ways—including cutting, crumpling, erasing, shredding, and

using other mark-making approaches— along with printed landscape images from UMMA’s collection, to create layered pieces that challenged students to embed themselves in existing spaces or radically alter their visual environment.

sequence, Teaching with Art for Equity, will focus on the arts as a rigorous form of expression and communication. By focusing on BIPOC artists and the potential visual arts have to generate knowledge while making ideas and feelings visible in non-verbal ways, Katie Robertson, SOE Lecturer in Teacher Education and one of the key developers of the course, hopes this will lead to deeper sociocultural understanding.

“We will work with teacher candidates and in-service teachers to explore the ethical necessity of focusing on dije (diversity, inclusion, justice, and equity) priorities in public school classrooms and interrogate how their own identities impact their teaching,” Robertson says.

SOE students have already begun developing seeds for units based on UMMA’s collection objects. In conversation with museum docents, students discussed

“This project speaks to a national conversation around the disconnect between educators and learners’ identities.”

“I want to empower Detroit youth with tools and resources that will impact their lives today and tomorrow,” Rock says.

In addition to direct work with students, the partnership’s plans include helping beginning teachers learn how to combat systemic racism and structural inequality by using visual art in their teaching. Art can open discussion to personal connections and experiences. For example, preservice kindergarten teachers planned a unit in which they asked students to draw a house before and after looking at images of buildings designed by architect Zaha Hadid. Expanding perspectives on “the norm” and challenging who creates those expectations feels natural when discussing visual art. To this end, UMMA and the SOE will collaborate to redesign a key unit in a course for elementary teacher candidates to focus on teaching for equity with visual art.

Funded by a grant from U-M’s Center for Research on Learning and Teaching, this elementary teacher education course

how they might incorporate art into assessment (especially for pre-readers), how they encouraged students’ identity exploration, as well as promotion of Social/ Emotional Learning and Learning for Justice principles.

Teaching with Art for Equity will be promoted not just to teacher candidates, but to those across campus who may wish to work in quasi-educational roles outside of public school classrooms, such as arts organizations and after-school programs.

“These courses have the potential to reach a vastly wider audience of students who want to advance equity within the organizations they are a part of,” says Robertson. “This project speaks to a national conversation around the disconnect between educators’ and learners’ identities.

It attempts to reduce the harmful implications of that divide by valuing BIPOC educators’ contributions to action research projects and curriculum development.” ■

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Leslie Bell (ABEd ’89, TeachCert ’89), who carried on the family tradition as well, teaching in Detroit schools until her retirement in 2016.

The scholarship supports teacher education students at the SOE. “I just felt this was a great way to honor my family, not just my parents, but my sister, too—they have committed their whole lives to teaching,” says Giles.

The Bell Family Scholarship Fund is intended to assist students who hail from Detroit and who plan to pursue the Detroit teaching school pathway. The teaching school model, which launched three years ago, welcomes selected teacher interns from SOE into the highly supportive environment at The School at Marygrove, a school in the Detroit Public Schools Community District that is part of an innovative cradle-to-career (prenatal through grade 20 or “P-20”) educational partnership. Interns have the opportunity to remain in the teaching school for a three-year residency while they continue to develop their practice and grow into educators who stay in the profession and mentor others.

Giles, who grew up just a mile from what was once Marygrove College, knows the campus well: it was where she attended preschool.

Her parents still live in the neighborhood. Given that the P-20 Partnership is a cradle-to-career campus, the opportunity to support teachers in training felt like a full-circle moment.

The scholarship is part of the Teach Blue initiative, a new approach to support the recruitment, preparation, and retention of teachers through a comprehensive pipeline of opportunities and resources.

“When I learned about Teach Blue and the P-20 Partnership, establishing a scholarship just felt like a great way to honor my family. Not only would it benefit teachers and students, but the whole Detroit community.” ■

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rowing up in a family of educators, Stacy Giles (ABEd ’95, TeachCert ’95) always knew she wanted to become a teacher. A reverence for the profession of education was “ingrained in us,” says Giles. “I remember every teacher I ever had from elementary through high school. They all had a positive impact. And that was the type of positive impact I wanted to make.”

Giles’ mother, Sandra Bell (ABEd ’59, TeachCert ’59, AM ’66), taught school before raising three children of her own. Then, as a parent, she volunteered in her children’s schools; she could often be found in the library following Giles and her siblings as they moved up through the grades.

Over the span of his 37-year career in education, Giles’ father, Alvin Bell, held several teaching and administration positions in the Detroit public school system—from substitute teacher to driver’s ed instructor, staff coordinator, and eventually principal. One of his former students was so changed by her experience in his fourth grade classroom, she went on to make an award-winning documentary about the lasting impact he had on her and her classmates. Colorblind tells the story of Bell, a Black teacher, and the lasting impression he left on his all-white class of fourth graders the year before they would be dispersed because of the 1967 Detroit uprisings.

As an undergraduate at U-M, Giles followed in her parents’ footsteps, studying in the SOE. She landed a job just weeks after graduation, suddenly finding herself exactly where she had always planned to be: at the head of a second grade classroom.

Now, along with her husband, Joseph Giles (BBA ’96, JD ’01, MBA ’01), Giles is reaching students in her hometown in a whole new way.

The Chicago-based couple recently established the Bell Family Scholarship Fund to honor the legacy of Giles’ mother, father, and sister

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New Scholarship Honors the Legacy of a Family of Educators

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able to define their own success.

Boynton told Diversity Women her

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ultimate goal is to “reduce barriers to brilliance.”

Ann Ironside Ainslie (AB ’74, MS ’75, TeachCert ’75) belongs to Alpha Delta Kappa, an international association for women educators. She invites current students to an event in July, which will serve to introduce students to Alpha Delta Kappa Collegiate clubs and discuss the possibility of beginning a chapter at U-M. For more information and to register, e-mail: ann1019.nce@gmail.com.

Christine (Woolford) Baines (AM ’14), along with her sister, Renita White, MD, launched the podcast Cradle and All in October 2021. On the podcast, Baines employs her background in education to inform honest conversations about the challenges faced in motherhood.

As a nonprofit professional and entrepreneur, she has dedicated her career to the service of children and families. In addition to the podcast, Baines owns Twinkle Toes Nanny Agency in northeast Atlanta.

Trey Boynton (AM ’98), Senior Director, Inclusion & Collaboration Strategy & Inclusive Solutions at Cisco, was named to the Diversity Women Class of 2022 Elite 100 list of Black women leaders. Boynton says her diversity and inclusion efforts are “head and heart work” centered on creating workplaces where employees and teams are valued, celebrated, and

Since leaving U-M, Melissa Charles (AM ’16) has been working at UC– Berkeley, where she has honed her skills as an educator, facilitator, and administrator. She is now in the process of opening a K–8 Liberation School in Northern California, which will emphasize using a liberatory framework in educating youth in nontraditional ways and also provide educators with a dignified teaching environment. Charles and her team have created a docuseries about their efforts to create the Liberation School, and the research that undergirds their curriculum and pedagogy. The series is currently being screened at various universities. Charles is eager to connect with fellow CSHPE graduates who are interested in learning more about this endeavor. For more information on Melissa’s work, visit agapemvmt.org and for more information on the school, visit neighborprogram.org/shakurcenter.

After 40+ years of practicing law, Steven Gnewkowski (AB ’71, TeachCert ’71) challenged himself to use the skills he acquired at U-M to write a novel, recalling some of his

experiences in Scotland as a member of Rotary International’s Group Study Exchange Team. Gnewkowski book, titled The Celtic Knot, recently received a favorable 4 star review from the onlinebookclub.org. Copies are available for purchase on Amazon for anyone interested.

Lauren McArthur Harris (PhD ’08) served as lead editor on the book Teaching Difficult Histories in Difficult Times: Stories of Practice (Teachers College Press, 2022). Featuring the voices of teacher educators, classroom teachers, and museum educators, these stories provide readers with rare examples of how to plan for, teach, and reflect on difficult histories.

Lisa Johnson (AM ’97), owner and founder of Mathtopian Preparation, Inc., was selected along with 44 others for the 2021 Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses national program.

Launched in 2009, the program provides business education, support services, and pathways to capital for growth-oriented entrepreneurs.

A teacher by trade, Johnson taught at several independent schools in Los Angeles before transitioning to being an entrepreneur as the owner of a private tutoring, test prep, and consulting company. She opened

Mathtopian Preparation in Los Angeles in 2005 and would go on to expand her business, adding an office in Atlanta.

Mathtopian Preparation now serves students all over the world in person and virtually. Students work with Johnson and her team from middle school through college—acquiring the courage and confidence to take on any academic challenge.

“Many people believe math is simply too hard for them to grasp,” says Johnson. “My mission is to demystify what challenges students and provide them with the support they need to think critically, to ask questions, and to develop the skills that will help them throughout their educational careers and in life.”

Katie Torkelson-Regan (AM ’18, TeachCert ’18) was selected by the Michigan Science Teachers Association as the 2022 Science Teacher of Promise.

This award is given to educators who have been teaching for fewer than five years, and who inspire students, use innovative teaching strategies, demonstrate the potential for science leadership, and exhibit a passion for science and teaching. Katie TorkelsonRegan teaches biology and environmental science at Washtenaw Technical Middle College, a high school in Ann Arbor.

Connecting innovators with industry experts “At a time when our experiences are increasingly mediated by technology, we need to be thinking about designing for equity, inclusion, and accessibility.

These issues are foregrounded in conference sessions that can contribute to discussions about equitable and ethical uses of technology for human learning.”

Dr. Leslie Rupert Herrenkohl Welcome and Opening Remarks

“We try to conduct our research in ways that won’t reproduce the status quo. We use participatory methods.

This approach challenges the traditional power dynamic between researchers and research subjects.”

Devon Riter Doctoral student, “Exploring

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hat began as a conversation during a break in Professor Leslie Herrenkohl’s Fall 2021 How People Learn class turned into a two-day conference organized and run by SOE and School of Information graduate students. Over two days in April, UX@UM drew 245+ students, faculty, staff, and industry participants from all over U-M and the globe to explore user experience as a form of learning.

“A year ago, I was attending a MOOC, Leading Educational Innovation and Improvement. If it weren’t for that MOOC, I wouldn’t be here. A year ago I didn’t imagine I would be at the University of Michigan. But I grew out of that MOOC. And that’s what UX really is. UX is about growing from our learning experiences.”

Aya Magdy Isaac Graduate student lead organizer, Welcome and Opening Remarks

“In our study we could identify patterns in students’ comments and interaction.

Do multimodal tools (like emojis) affect how a student engages with the content?”

Megha Bairwal LSA undergraduate, “Research SUAVE: Exploring Educational Possibilities of the Video Annotation Tool Anotemos”

User Experience and Belonging in Critical STEM Education Research”

“We need to think about how the ebbs and flows of technology are affecting education.” Anjli Narwani Doctoral candidate, “Educational Technology Solution Design: Learning From Industry Experiences”

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“Whose voices really matter in design and research? When we think about participatory design, it’s not just who is at that design table. It’s also about whose table are we at? And what happens at that table?” Dr. Angela Calabrese-Barton “Participatory Action Research Methods for Justice-Oriented Design, Teaching, Learning, and User Experience”

University of Michigan Regents Jordan B. Acker, Huntington Woods Michael J. Behm, Grand Blanc Mark J. Bernstein, Ann Arbor Paul W. Brown, Ann Arbor Sarah Hubbard, Okemos Denise Ilitch, Bingham Farms Ron Weiser, Ann Arbor Katherine E. White, Ann Arbor Mary Sue Coleman (ex officio)

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Happy 100th Birthday!

The SOE welcomes back Grover Trytten, a University High School and School of Education alumnus, who shares his July 1921 birthday with our school!