Michigan Education Magazine Fall 2023

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T h e M ag a z i n e o f t h e U n i v e r s i t y o f M i c h i g a n m a r sa l fa m i ly S c h o o l o f E d u cat i o n

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t the Marsal Family School of Education, our recognition that education and educators play a fundamental role in all aspects of human life leads to our commitment to provide expertise and opportunities for learning about education outside of established education institutions. For us, this means conducting research in partnership with communities and organizations beyond preK-12 and higher education institutions; establishing training for students and professionals who are served by understanding how people learn, grow, and work together; and providing opportunities for our students to learn in diverse contexts.

To do powerful work on behalf of children, youth, and adults, we must learn in, from, and with communities. Research-practice partnerships are an important way that we collaborate with communities.

Two research-practice partnerships that focus on education outside of formal classroom spaces are Dr. Angela Calabrese Barton’s work with Boys and Girls Club of Lansing and Impression 5 Science Center and Dr. Jeremy Wright-Kim’s work with Lake Superior State University and Anishinaabe community members.

Dr. Calabrese Barton works with organizations committed to using informal learning to break down barriers to STEM learning. The youth with whom she and her collaborators work are making impactful contributions to their communities and growing their knowledge of STEM subjects and their identities as researchers and problem-solvers. Just as Dr. Calabrese Barton and her colleagues are trying to address inequities through their development of learning environments, support of educators, and design of curriculum, the youth also take up issues of justice in STEM. The Indigenous Youth Education Collective, with which Dr. Wright-Kim works, is a youth participatory action research project aimed at creating spaces for Native students to explore their Native identities, particularly in the context of K-12 public education. The partnership has encouraged Native youth to become researchers and change agents in their community. For many participants, it has helped them gain clarity on their higher education goals, including how they want to see higher education institutions become more inclusive and supportive of Native students.

We’ve increasingly recognized the interest from students and the demand from employers to offer a strong foundation in the study of education for students who aren’t necessarily pursuing “traditional” education careers. In addition to our exciting new undergraduate degree program—Learning, Equity, and Problem Solving for the Public Good—that we introduced in our spring magazine, I am pleased to update you on our Education for Empowerment minor and the addition of a new MOOC focused on Learning Experience Design.

In the five years since we launched the minor, we have educated students from 40 different majors across the university! Through the required internship

Cover image: Participants in the Indigenous Youth Education Collective

component, these students have applied their coursework to the kind of engagement that brought many of them to us in the first place: serving children, youth, families, and communities.

Several years ago, Dr. Christopher Quintana and Dr. Rebecca Quintana created a popular Learning Experience Design certificate open to master’s students across the University of Michigan. This winter, they will launch a MOOC, which stands for Massive Open Online Course, to introduce a much wider audience to the principles and contemporary applications of learning experience design.

Since 2013, the students in our Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education have had outstanding opportunities to participate in domestic and international study trips. This summer, travel resumed after a hiatus forced by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Higher education students, faculty, and staff traveled to the San Francisco Bay Area to study how postsecondary education policy plays out at various levels and across diverse organizations. Organized by Melinda Richardson and Dr. Rosemary Perez, the trip’s success relied on strong networks of colleagues and alumni.

We are grateful to all the individuals and organizations who engaged our students in thought-provoking discussions during their 10-day experience.

This fall, we welcomed seven new members of our faculty. I am pleased to introduce them to you in this issue of Michigan Education. The process of growing our faculty presents an exciting opportunity for our entire community to learn about the fascinating scholarship of each highly qualified candidate and share input on the direction of our school. Dr. April Baker-Bell, Dr. Natalie Davis, Dr. Erin Flynn, Dr. Sharim Hannegan-Martinez, Dr. Vanessa Louis, Dr. Alaina Neal-Jackson, and Dr. Jon Wargo add immeasurably to our capacity for conducting research, teaching future education professionals, and fulfilling our commitment to just and equitable education practices and outcomes.

We are always learning and growing, so it makes sense that educators are found everywhere—across industry, within all communities, in organizations large and small—and opportunities to learn are unbounded by formal institutions of learning. We support the important work of all educators and encourage everyone to recognize the critical role that schools and colleges of education play across all education contexts. ■

7 Dean Elizabeth Birr Moje Editor Danielle Dimcheff

This fall, the Marsal School welcomes seven talented scholars to its community

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Associate Editor & Lead Writer Jeanne Hodesh Contributing Writer Chris Tiffany Design Savitski Design, Ann Arbor Hammond Design, Ann Arbor We invite you to join the conversation by submitting ideas for future issues, letters to the editor, and class notes. soe.umich.edu/magazine Stay connected!

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

A note on editorial style: The Marsal School strives to establish consistency across materials and documents, however, we acknowledge that terminology and styling are personal. We make the intentional choice to honor the preferences of the subjects who are interviewed for articles and we wish to accommodate those preferences where possible.

Meet the Marsal Family School of Education’s Newest Faculty Members Breaking Down Barriers and Building with Tools in Afterschool Makerspaces Dr. Angela Calabrese Barton’s research shows the impacts STEM education in informal learning environments can have on communities and the world

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Providing Space for Native Youth to Connect with Their Identities While Navigating K-12 Public Schools The Indigenous Youth Education Collective is a youth participatory action research project led by—and for—Anishinaabe scholars, community members, and students

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Education for Empowerment Minor Internships Inspire Diverse Career Trajectories As the minor serves students across the university, minor students serve the local community

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Back on the Road Again

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Beyond the Classroom and Into Extended Reality

After a pandemic pause, CSHPE experiential learning trips return

A new series of online courses has the potential to reach future learning experience designers everywhere

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Happenings Champions for Education Class Notes In Memory

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In August, Dean Moje and The School at Marygrove Principal Lisa Williams visited with students, families, and community members at the Marygrove Block Party.

Everyone enjoyed family-friendly activities, campus tours, music, dancing, food, and games.

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Above 2023 Alumni Award recipients Laura I. Rendón, Alicia Baturoni Cortez, and Jessica Cañas shared their educational and professional trajectories with current students and members of the Marsal School community during the inspiring Elevating Educators panel discussion.

Above Following Dean Moje’s state of the school address at Fall Convocation, a panel of faculty members including Professors Anne Ruggles Gere, Elizabeth KerenKolb, Christopher Quintana, and Ying Xu spoke about their respective research on AI-mediated education.

Top and above Alumni, faculty, staff, and students celebrated Homecoming at the annual Marsal School tailgate before the Michigan Wolverines beat the Rutgers Scarlet Knights, 31-7.

Above A favorite fall tradition, Petey’s Donuts treated the Marsal School community to apple cider and donuts.

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To kick off Homecoming weekend, alumni from the school’s class of 1973 reminisced at the 50th reunion luncheon.

Above The Marsal School community rolled up their sleeves to turn t-shirts maize and blue at a tie-dye party hosted by the Office of Diversity, Inclusion, Justice, and Equity.

Above New graduate students received a warm welcome to campus at orientation in August. The full day of activities included the opportunity to meet classmates and advisors, gather important details about their first year of graduate school, and learn how to become active members of the Marsal School community.

Meet Our New Faculty Members

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r. April Baker-Bell is a prominent scholar engaged in leading research on just and equitable language, culture, and justice in education. Her scholarship is focused on Black language education, Black language, and its historical and sociopolitical roots in antiBlack racism, bringing together theory and empirical research to show the multiple ways that normative school practice advances a view of Black language as incorrect. As a powerful corrective to such views, Baker-Bell makes visible the linguistic structure and richness of the historical language of Black Americans.

In addition to numerous articles, BakerBell is the author of the award-winning book Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy, which provides ethnographic snapshots of how Black students navigate and negotiate their linguistic and racial identities across multiple contexts. An influential scholar, she has received many awards that showcase her position in her field, including the Coalition for Community Writing Outstanding Book Award (2021); the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s New Directions Fellowship (2021); Michigan State University’s Community Engagement Scholarship Award (2021) and Distinguished Partnership Award for Community-Engaged Creative Activity (2021); and the National Council for Teachers of English (NCTE) George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language (2020).

Baker-Bell joins the Marsal School from Michigan State University, where, in addition to her appointment in the Department of English, she was also faculty in the Department of African American and African Studies, and an adjunct associate professor at MSU’s Center for Bioethics and Social Justice in the College of Human Medicine.

As a teacher and researcher, how do you also view your work as activism?

One of your recent research projects involved collaborating with health care scholars and researchers. What led to this project and how does it dovetail with your research on racial and linguistic justice in education?

In February 2020, I was contacted by a team of medical researchers who read an article I wrote about anti-Black linguistic racism and anti-racist pedagogy. The research team was looking for a scholar with a unique scholastic expertise at the intersections of anti-Black racism awareness and anti-racist pedagogy development and assessment, an expertise that is critically missing in the field of medicine and medical education, to support them with

One of my favorite Black feminist teacheractivists is bell hooks, who believed that teaching/learning was activism. According to hooks, activist teaching involves a revolutionary pedagogy of resistance—a way of thinking about pedagogy in relation to the practice of freedom (1994). A revolutionary pedagogy of resistance is foundational to my research and teaching on linguistic justice. The end goal of Linguistic Justice is Black liberation. Linguistic Justice is an anti-racist approach that seeks to dismantle anti-Black linguistic racism in classrooms and in the world. (cont’d on p.8)

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piloting an anti-racist workshop series for their health care leaders that would support their hospital’s strategic vision of becoming an anti-racist organization. This interaction led to me being the lead researcher on a crossdisciplinary research project that involved collaborating with health care scholars and researchers to develop, implement, and evaluate an anti-racist medical curriculum intervention that supported health care professionals with developing an anti-racist praxis for confronting and reducing racial bias and anti-Black racism in medical and health care institutions.

Associate Professor of Educational Studies

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Dr. April Baker-Bell

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The Marsal School welcomes seven scholars to our community

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Meet Our New Faculty Members

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how to be well together.

Being in proximity isn’t the same as being with the people there. The latter involves intellectual humility, patience, and an openness to seeing the beauty and complexity of the spaces people occupy. Good intentions and sharp scholarly ideas don’t erase histories of power, exploitation, and violence. I’m excited to support students as they explore possibilities for communityengaged work.

I developed the #BlackLanguageSyllabus in community with my academic sister, Dr. Carmen Kynard. We recognize that antiBlackness and anti-Black linguistic racism are ubiquitous in schools and society, so we created the #BlackLanguageSyllabus as a space for political discussions and praxis of Black Language as guided by the work of teacher-researcher-activists in classrooms and communities who stand against institutions that seek to annihilate Black Language + Black Life. The #BlackLanguageSyllabus is an open-access resource created outside traditional academe to reshape how knowledge is produced, affirmed, and accessed. ■

Can you tell us more about the practice of dreaming as it pertains to the Teacher Dreaming, Design, & Learning Lab?

Dr. Natalie R. Davis Assistant Professor of Educational Studies

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r. Natalie Davis’s (PhD ’17) research explores the relationship between justice-oriented learning environments and sociopolitical development of children from minoritized communities. She is particularly interested in pedagogical practices and sociocultural processes that facilitate and/or constrain Black youths’ critical readings of self and of historical and contemporary issues of (in)justice inside and outside schools.

A National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Davis has received an Early Career Fellowship in Middle Childhood and Education from the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and Society of Research on Child Development (SRCD); a Distinguished Dissertation Award from Division G (Social Context of Education) of AERA; and the Dimond Dissertation Award from the U-M Marsal Family School of Education.

Davis practices an ethic of working and being in community, developing research products that speak to academic and public audiences and practice intergenerational kinship, such as her creation of The Teacher Dreaming, Design & Learning Lab, an educator collective and research project that is focused on explorations of (professional)

learning, pedagogical imagination, justice, and childhood.

A former third grade teacher, Davis earned her PhD in Educational Studies with a focus on Educational Foundations and Policy from the Marsal School in 2017. She then worked as a postdoctoral research fellow in the Learning Sciences at Northwestern University. Davis returns to U-M from Georgia State University, where she was an assistant professor in the department of Early Childhood and Elementary Education and the Master of Arts in Creative and Innovative Education.

What tenets of community-engaged research do you hope to advance through your teaching and mentorship?

Rather than a set of practices, communityoriented scholarship starts as an ethos, a commitment to the continual process of learning

I’ve noticed a tendency in the field to emphasize educational justice pursuits that involve people fighting and resisting with less consideration of how the seeds of beautiful, necessary social change are sown through dreaming and imagining what isn’t yet but what might one day be. Educators need spaces where they are supported in connecting dreams with childhoods, critical learning, and design. These are some of the things we are exploring in conceptualizing the lab as a dreamspace.

How does it feel to return to your alma mater, U-M? It was meant to be! I’m still in awe about how all fell in place with the perfect timing. I remember feeling overwhelmed as a doctoral student, wondering if/how I could be successful while bringing my full self to this work.

I’ve received so much love and guidance in this transition. I’m excited for all the ways I’ve grown and everything I’ll be able to accomplish in this new but familiar space. This homecoming is special. ■

What led you to focus on children’s stories in your research?

My research is an outgrowth of my time teaching Head Start in multicultural, multilingual classrooms. As a doctoral student, vivid memories of the centrality of story in the way that children made meaning

In early childhood education, care and education are viewed as inextricably linked.

Increasingly, care is viewed as a radical antidote to education’s individualistic and competitive imperatives. Mary Schleppegrell is not an early childhood scholar, but more than most Mary has been a powerful model for me of how to mentor others into a deep sense of care for meaning-making as well as the people that we make meaning with. ■

through language, drawing, writing, and play suggested that storytelling could be leveraged for language learning in ways that are child-driven, rather than teacherprescribed.

Could you tell us more about your qualitative research approaches?

The primary approach that I use draws on systemic functional linguistics to demonstrate the multiple, varied patterns that children employ when storying their experience. Fine-grained linguistic analysis can help tune teachers’ attention to predictable ways of using language, not just in children’s stories, but in the written texts that children encounter in schools. Discourse analysis of this kind is ideal for making tacit knowledge explicit so that it can be shared.

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r. Erin Elizabeth Flynn’s (PhD ’13) scholarship focuses on language and literacy development during the early childhood years. Specifically, she studies early childhood language and classroom interaction in multilingual settings to enhance teachers’ expectations of economically marginalized children by disrupting the dominant discourse that they are not ready for high-level learning. Her recent research also explores teachers’ knowledge of and attitudes toward children’s language and stories. Using qualitative research approaches like systemic functional linguistics, her work illuminates the diversity and sophistication of young children’s storytelling in multicultural, multilingual preschool classrooms, thus advancing strengths-based teaching and learning while rejecting deficit conceptualizations of young children.

A skilled teacher and program leader, Flynn comes to the Marsal School with deep experience teaching courses focused on child, youth, and family studies and educator preparation across diverse program areas at all levels. She approaches her work through strength-based, liberatory, and traumainformed practices. Her teaching practice is rooted in identity, organized to develop reciprocity with students, and centers the intellectual contributions of scholars with non-dominant identities. She is also a dedicated advisor and mentor, particularly for first-generation students.

Flynn earned a doctorate in Educational Studies with a focus on Literacy, Language, and Culture at the University of Michigan.

This fall, she returns to the Marsal School from her position as an associate professor of child, youth, and family studies at Portland State University.

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Is there a figure you encountered during the course of your academic preparation who became a model for your own practice as a mentor?

Associate Professor of Educational Studies

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Dr. Erin Flynn

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Meet Our New Faculty Members

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Dr. Sharim Hannegan-Martinez Assistant Professor of Educational Studies

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r. Sharim Hannegan-Martinez’s teaching-informed research examines the relationship between trauma and healing, loving pedagogies, literacy, and student wellness, particularly as it relates to Students of Color. Embedded in her research is an understanding of trauma as structural, and inherently tied to racism and other forms of oppression that disproportionately affect Students and Communities of Color.

Before pursuing her PhD at the University of California, Los Angeles, HanneganMartinez was a high school English teacher in East Oakland where she received multiple teaching awards including the Teacher of

the Year Award from Teachers for Social Justice. As a university instructor, she has taught courses including Composition for Teachers, Literacy Across the Disciplines, Trauma-Informed and Healing Centered Pedagogies, and Pedagogical Theory and Foundations. At the Marsal School, she will teach courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels, including a course on traumainformed and healingcentered pedagogies.

She will also teach in and run the Race and Social Justice Institute.

Hannegan-Martinez received the 2022 Dissertation of the Year Award from Division G (Social Context of Education) of the American Educational Research Association. She was also recently named a 2022–2024 Cultivating New Voices Among Scholars of Color Fellow by the National Council of English Teachers. In addition to her research and teaching, she is a founding member of the People’s Education Movement, Bay Area and a part of the Education for Liberation network. She comes to the Marsal School from the University of Kentucky, where she was an assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction in the College of Education.

Can you tell us about loving pedagogies?

My work on loving pedagogies really emerged as a result of my research on trauma and healing. While the data for child trauma is staggering, the research was also clear that loving relationships can serve

as a protective barrier and as a vehicle for healing and so I became committed to figuring out what love looks and feels like in the context of the classroom. To conceptualize love, I draw heavily from Women of Color feminists and Indigenous communities and worked alongside my former students to develop a framework for love. Ultimately, we argue that love is imperative for our survival, healing, wellness, and sustainability.

How did your years as a high school English teacher inform your research agenda?

The lessons I learned from the young people I had the privilege to teach continue to guide everything that I do as a community member, researcher, and university professor. Specifically, my work challenges pathologies of trauma and focuses on the love and healing that I know is possible in our classrooms—because I’ve experienced it. Everything that I believe is possible in schools and in the world, I believe because the young people I have taught have shown it to be true.

As a founding member of the People’s Education Movement, Bay Area, what organizing practices do you bring to your research and classroom?

So much of what I learned about research and teaching, I learned from organizing. In addition to criticality and a commitment to fighting for the world we deserve, some of the primary lessons I carry with me are about the importance of being in authentic community, centering the voices of those who are most marginalized, decentering myself, and the importance of true interdependence—that we cannot be free or well if we are not all free, all well. As Gwendolyn Brooks said, “we are each other’s magnitude and bond.” ■

Dr. Vanessa Louis Clinical Assistant Professor of Educational Studies

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r. Vanessa Louis’s research interests include abolitionist teaching, antiracist pedagogies, research-practice partnerships, community cultural wealth, teacher residencies and fellowships, and culturally relevant science education.

Louis served for six years as a middle and high school science teacher and for two years as an administrator and instructional coach. During her doctoral journey, she utilized abolitionist teaching and emancipatory pedagogies to assist early career science teachers in developing cultural competence as part of the NSF-funded project Devel-

What originally fueled your interest in STEM education?

In sixth grade, the words “Vanessa is a horrible science student” were scrawled across my progress report. I was crushed because I loved science and wanted it to love me back.

I took high-level science courses, pursued a biology degree, and became a science

The Marsal Family School of Education provides a space and context to engage in research pertaining to teacher preparation and teacher development that addresses issues of race and racism while also engaging in teaching strategies, and exploring new practices, to challenge the current structures that are harming marginalized groups.

What communities and activities do you look forward to connecting with in Ann Arbor?

I grew up on a college campus and cannot wait for football season! I’m also excited about concerts, fairs, and shopping. I look forward to also engaging with communities outside of Ann Arbor. The Detroit community has been inviting and provided many opportunities to network. ■

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In terms of your research agenda, what drew you to the Marsal School?

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teacher. As a science teacher, I aimed to make sure all Black and Brown students felt and knew they belonged in science classrooms and were scientists.

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oping STEM Professionals as Educators and Teacher Leaders (DSPETL). As a graduate research assistant, Louis engaged in a research-practice partnership to address problems of practice surrounding STEM literacy in Black and Brown communities.

She also collaborated with the CREATE Teacher Residency Program to examine the experiences of Black teacher fellows as they navigate a social justice-oriented program.

Louis earned her PhD at Georgia State University (GSU), focusing on teaching and learning with a concentration in science education. She received the Outstanding PhD Student Award from GSU and was named a Community for Advancing Discovery Research in Education Fellow by the National Science Foundation.

At the Marsal School, Louis will teach graduate and undergraduate students in the science methods course in the Secondary Teacher Education Program. She will also teach a multicultural education and a field instructor course in the Elementary Teacher Education Program.

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Meet Our New Faculty Members

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Dr. Alaina Neal-Jackson Clinical Assistant Professor of Educational Studies

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r. Alaina Neal-Jackson’s (AM ’12, PhD ’18) research is centered on race and gender in schooling—part of a larger interest in the health and welfare of Black students particularly, but not singularly, in underserved contexts. Drawing upon sociological frames and critical race and gender theories, Neal-Jackson examines how schools, as social institutions, structure Black girls’ and women’s experiences and opportunities, and in what ways this structuring reproduces social inequalities along raced, gendered, and classed lines.

Neal-Jackson earned her bachelor’s degree in Rhetoric, Narrative, and Image from the University of California, Berkeley before pursuing her studies at the Marsal Family School of Education.

She completed a master’s with a concentration in Educational Leadership and Policy and a doctorate in Educational Studies.

Her scholarship has been published in the Review of Educational Research, Teachers’ College Record, The Journal of College Student Development, and The Journal of Educational Administration and History.

While completing her dissertation, Neal-Jackson co-led a school-based restorative justice center, which ignited a passion for expanding the transformative potential of restorative practices within teacher education and preK-12 educational spaces. Neal-Jackson previously served as the Educational Culture and Justice Coordinator for the Marsal School’s Detroit P-20 Partnership, where she worked closely with the community at The School at Marygrove to build a culture where social justice is seen and felt in policies and everyday practice.

What led you to focus your research on race and gender in schooling?

As an undergraduate at Berkeley, I observed classes where Black girls were hypervisible to teachers; their every move was scrutinized and read as disruptive or disrespectful. Yet

they remained invisible because the harm that resulted from this hyper focus and pejorative labeling was never acknowledged.

These observations felt very familiar. When I explored the educational literature to see how scholars made sense of this, I found a disturbing silence on the specific ways that schools structured Black girls’ experiences.

What courses do you look forward to teaching at the Marsal School?

I am looking forward to teaching courses where we focus on anti-racism as a way of “being” in the world. Rather than just asking our students to critically interrogate what they do in the classroom (e.g. particular teaching practices), I am excited to push them to pair that with how they show up out of the classroom through everyday acts of anti-racism.

What books are on your academic and nonacademic reading list?

Academically speaking, I am reading Strong Black Girls: Reclaiming Schools in Their Own Image edited by Danielle Apugo, Lynnette Mawhinney, and Afiya Mbilishaka, as well as Cultivating Joyful Learning Spaces for Black Girls: Insights into Interrupting School Pushout by Monique Morris. Non-academically, I am diving into Rest Is Resistance by Tricia Hersey. ■

Dr. Jon Wargo Associate Professor of Educational Studies

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r. Jon Wargo’s research reconceptualizes the role of media and technology as it comes to intersect with critical literacy learning by children and youth. Leveraging young peoples’ ingenuity as sights and signs for learning, his teaching and scholarship focus on understanding and sustaining the heterogeneity of human sensemaking in the contexts of community inquiry and social change. His scholarship explores how race, gender, sexuality, and other discourses of difference are taken up in teacher preparation and examines the impact of doing this work with pre-service and in-service teachers. An

How has your research on discourses of difference in teacher education influenced your own practice in the classroom?

As a multiethnic first-generation college graduate and gay cisgender man, I know I am one of the first course texts my students encounter. As such, it is critically important to engage how multiple axes of difference, power, and oppression come to inform our work in teacher education. Through sustained partnerships with area schools that leveraged and built horizontal expertise, my work examines how particular domains of power (e.g., cultural, disciplinary, structural) shape how educators advance anti-bias, anti-racist (ABAR) pedagogy. This learning, in turn, has informed what and who I center in my classroom.

What are you looking forward to as you return to the state of Michigan?

Community. Since graduating from Michigan State in 2016, I’ve worked to sustain relationships with classroom teachers, community partners, and a range of collaborators here in Michigan. I am absolutely thrilled to return to a space that has always felt like home. ■

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Sound is a felt technology. Through my work, I’ve tried to highlight how sound becomes a communicative resource to amplify issues of injustice (e.g., gentrification, climate precarity). When children and youth write with sound, they rethink purpose, performance, and audience, core concepts in composition.

Sound invites listeners to hear problems in new and complex ways.

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With a particular focus on sound, your work in literacy studies highlights the affordances of multimodal composition. Why sound?

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interdisciplinary scholar, he has also investigated topics related to teacher education, digital culture, educational policy, and qualitative research methods.

An award-winning researcher and nationally recognized scholar, Wargo won early career achievement awards from the Literacy Research Association and the Children’s Literature Assembly in 2021. In 2020, he was named an NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow.

In addition to book chapters and public scholarship, including blogs and videos, his work has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including Research in the Teaching of English, Learning, Media and Technology, Mind, Culture, and Activity, Anthropology and Education Quarterly, and the Journal of Literacy Research. He has received distinguished article awards from the National Council for Teachers of English and the American Educational Research Association Queer Studies Special Interest Group.

A former kindergarten teacher, Wargo earned a PhD in Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education from Michigan State University in 2016. Upon receiving his PhD, he was appointed as an assistant professor in the Wayne State University College of Education. He joins the Marsal School from Boston College, where he served as an assistant professor in the Lynch School of Education and Human Development.

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Breaking Down Barriers and Building with Tools in Afterschool Makerspaces

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Angela Calabrese Barton’s research shows the impact STEM education in informal learning environments can have on communities and the world

he vast majority of kids’ time is not actually spent in school,” says Professor of Educational Studies Angela Calabrese Barton. “So informal learning environments play a really important role in terms of providing both compensatory education for what students might not be getting in school, as well as enlightenment to build beyond what they are learning in school and to open up pathways that schools might have foreclosed because of lack of resources and opportunity.”

As part of both her research and practice, Calabrese Barton teaches after-school STEM in community centers and makerspaces. With a focus on equity and justice, she is interested in

how informal learning environments can act as a mechanism for breaking down cultural and institutional barriers.

“For decades now, I’ve been working in community settings like afterschool programs and science centers to think about not only how to design learning environments that support justice-oriented outcomes, but also how to build capacity with educators to engage in pedagogical practices and curriculum design in order to support these justice-oriented outcomes,” says Calabrese Barton.

Since 2007, she has collaborated with Carmen Turner, Executive Director of the Boys and Girls Club of Lansing, on the Green Energy Technologies (GET) in the City pro-

gram. GET City is focused on youth development in energy and environmental science, engineering, and information technologies.

The program is built on the idea that meaningful learning happens when youth engage in authentic investigations of local problems, and have scaffolded opportunities to communicate with and educate others about those investigations.

Typically, explains Turner, “Boys and Girls Clubs are situated in urban areas where there are fewer resources, and where, a lot of the time, the kids are the first in their family to go to college.” From the outset, she was intrigued

by GET City’s potential to engage children who didn’t necessarily identify with STEM.

“The workshop tables are so well loved, they have drill marks and nail marks and paint all over them,” says Impression 5 Programs Manager Betsy Mappilaparampil. “They’re all scratched up, but in the most beautiful way because it’s like a history of the work that has been done in this room.”

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reflect those of the city of Lansing, which was more diverse than the science center’s mostly white and affluent membership. Finally, if its new makerspace was intended to be a place for teens, she wanted to know what teens would want out of it.

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The roof of the Boys and Girls Club had started leaking, and Turner was getting quotes from roofing companies when the kids approached her. Because they had learned about environmental impacts in GET City, they wanted a green roof. Even though it was out of her budget, Turner was listening. The kids researched alternatives, and proposed a white roof instead—a solution that would be energy-efficient and environmentally beneficial to the community. They found a company who could do the job and visited their facilities. With the kids’ research, Turner and Calabrese Barton put together a proposal that garnered $65,000 from the Dart Foundation to fund the project.

“We have a white roof because of the work that those fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth graders put together—and it’s because of what Angie instilled in them about change,” says Turner.

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Where they might worry about how they would be graded, or judgment from peers, Turner recognized the power of the club’s informal setting. With those barriers removed, she watched students develop self-esteem.

“I would go into Angie’s room and they would be doing science and engineering activities. I’m thinking, ‘Okay, they don’t know that they’re doing science and engineering because if you told them they were, they would say, “I can’t do it. I’m not interested. It’s boring. People tell me that’s not me, that I should go into something else.” In fact, that’s what Turner herself, a Woman of Color, was told when she was growing up. “So when Angie explained to me that the work could be done starting at the fourth and fifth grade, I said, ‘Yes, what do we have to lose? This is absolutely wonderful.’”

In the beginning of their research-practice partnership, recalls Turner, Calabrese Barton wheeled a cart with computers on it into any space she could find in the Boys and Girls Club facility to teach. Today, the GET City program operates out of the Dart Innovation Lab and Makerspace, engaging youth aged eight and up in deep and meaningful STEM learning (knowledge and practices), technical/engineering design work and problem-solving, critical thinking, and individual and group work.

“When Angie and I started, I remember her saying, ‘I’m not necessarily trying to create all of these engineers and scientists,’” recalls Turner. “Her idea was to help young People of Color understand strategic thinking. Because when you strategize, you become confident and good at everything. And that’s what started happening in school.”

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hen the club installed skylights, the kids watched how the sun traveled across the sky over the course of a day, and advised where they should be placed. When they wanted a makerspace, they presented to the Boys and Girls Club board, having the body of adults participate in activities they didn’t have the materials to complete. They wanted the board to feel their own frustration of doing activities without the proper resources. Once more, the Dart Foundation provided funding to make the makerspace a reality. Turner ticks off places where the GET City youth have made presentations: to the mayor of Lansing, in Washington DC, to Calabrese Barton’s colleagues.

“These kids are action,” she says.

In 2015, Calabrese Barton was awarded a Distinguished Fellowship from the William T. Grant Foundation to research the potential of makerspaces to create equitable learning opportunities for youth. To do this embedded research, she began another researchpractice partnership with Lansing’s Impression 5 Science Center.

Micaela Balzer, Director of Innovation and Learning at Impression 5, had noticed that the kids who attended the science center’s exhibits and programs stopped coming around age 12. She wanted to figure out how to engage teens, and how to shift its demographics to

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One of the first projects Calabrese Barton and Balzer worked on together was the formation of the Youth Action Council (YAC), a body of youth who would have a voice in what the makerspace would look like. They put out the call for participants to existing science center members as well as the public. Calabrese Barton also reached out to Turner to create a pathway for STEM-engaged Boys and Girls Club members to join the YAC. “My blessing was to have the Boys and Girls Club kids be a significant part of Impression 5—more than just going to visit and look at exhibits—but making a change and having a voice,” says Turner.

Comprising about 20 youth, YAC members ranged from fifth grade through high

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school. Participants and their families got free membership to the science center, and were encouraged to take any workshops they wanted. “The YAC is highly diverse in terms of race, socioeconomics, and even geography,” says Calabrese Barton. “Having that wide range ended up being a really powerful aspect of the YAC, because many of the younger kids stayed in it for five, six, seven, or eight years.

The older kids became mentors to the younger kids, and as new kids came on, the more experienced members would mentor them.”

When Impression 5’s new makerspace—the Think Tank—opened in 2017, the YAC’s input was evident in every aspect of its design.

“They wanted to create a space that was very different from what they were used to,” says Balzer. “Even details like the chairs were important. One of the kids said, ‘These chairs look like school chairs,’ so automatically they were boring. That filter of how something looks and then the emotions that it conveys based on its appearance really helped shape the space.”

“They were adamant they needed a ‘chill zone’ in the makerspace. So there’s a separate room for that. They wanted it to have a couch and a rainbow carpet,” says Calabrese Barton. “It literally is a place where kids, when they’re frustrated with a project they’re working on, can go and chill out. They also wanted rough draft projects to be displayed throughout the room so that everybody would feel like they could do it too. Instead of just seeing these perfect, beautiful final projects, which is often what you see displayed in a science center, there’s a place for people to display work in progress.”

The Think Tank has circuitry, woodworking, and robotics stations. There are Legos®, cardboard, and textiles for building.

There’s soldering equipment. The founding members of the YAC built nameplates using woodworking, crafting, and circuitry materials to make their names stand out on wooden boards. The nameplates adorn the walls of the Think Tank.

“The workshop tables are so well loved, they have drill marks and nail marks and paint all over them,” says Impression 5 Programs Manager, Betsy Mappilaparampil. “They’re all scratched up, but in the most beautiful way because it’s like a history of the work that has been done in this room.” Impression 5 offers a range of workshops in the space. The idea, says Calabrese Barton, is to “always make something you can bring home, to have something that’s meaningful to you.”

When the Think Tank was complete, says Calabrese Barton, “it changed how we at the science center thought about what it meant to design new exhibits and new spaces.”

The YAC, which meets once a month in the Think Tank, was asking questions like, “Who’s in the science center?” and “How are different lives represented in the science center?” Their discourse prompted Balzer and Impression 5’s leadership to question what they should do next.

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eanwhile, Calabrese Barton had become involved in a large partnership grant funded by the Wellcome Trust and the National Science Foundation to work with researchers who were embedded in informal science centers in four cities—two in the U.S. and two in the U.K. Known as the Youth Equity and STEM project (YESTEM), the international research-practice partnership focused on understanding and supporting equitable practices in informal STEM learning. In Lansing, Calabrese Barton worked

closely with her partners at the Boys and Girls Club and Impression 5 to figure out what those practices are.

One of the biggest challenges in informal learning environments, notes Calabrese Barton, is a lack of resources to support capacity building. Through the YESTEM project, the partner science educators worked with the researchers to identify beneficial teaching practices. “Often we don’t know our strengths until someone else points them out,” says Impression 5 Operations Manager Nik McPherson. “Being able to have those reflection moments to celebrate with a researcher who was observing me was really helpful.”

Using 3D renderings of the sculpture, the youth designed plans and voted on them, ultimately deciding to repaint the Big Mouth in a pixilated collage of 26 different skin tones with brown eyes...

Today, visitors often approach the Big Mouth and hold up their arm to literally find themselves represented in the sculpture.

Over the course of two years, YESTEM gathered data by documenting the youth perspective in youth participatory ethnographies and the educators’ perspective in participatory portfolio construction. Working in researchpractice partnership teams comprising educators, researchers, and youth, they identified consequential moments in the data that they wanted to zoom in on more closely.

“From the analytic work that we did together over years—not just in Lansing, but in our other partner cities—we identified nine practices that we think really matter in supporting justice-oriented teaching and learning in informal settings,” explains Calabrese Barton. One of those practices is reclaiming.

Once the Think Tank was open, the YAC continued to have conversations about reclaiming the science center to make it truly reflective of everyone who is involved in

“Once you start reclaiming spaces, or noticing and taking action,” says Balzer, “it becomes part of who you are. Their critical observations did not just stop.”

Next, the YAC undertook the reclaiming of the Big Mouth, an iconic sculpture that has been part of Impression 5 since its founding.

All along, it had always been a large Caucasian mouth with blue eyes. The sculpture was in need of restoration, and already a funder had come on board to make the necessary repairs. So the YAC began prototyping what the Big Mouth could look like in its new iteration, and how it could be remade to better reflect the Lansing community. Using 3D renderings of the sculpture, the youth designed plans and voted on them, ultimately deciding to repaint the Big Mouth in a pixilated collage of 26 different skin tones with brown eyes. In addition, they produced educational materials and new signage to explain how the Big Mouth’s design represents the science center’s efforts to be inclusive and described the importance of breaking down barriers to STEM participation. Today, visitors often approach the Big Mouth and hold up their arm to literally find themselves represented in the sculpture.

In April 2023, a group of YAC participants took the train to Chicago to present their research in a project titled, “Reclaiming our Science Center towards Social

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science. When talking about who is seen and unseen in science, their attention was drawn to the classrooms in Impression 5, which were named for famous figures including Newton, Galileo, and Edison.

“Here we were, yet again, a science center that is willing to support youth in having these conversations, but we were also part of the system that continues to only showcase white male scientists,” says Balzer.

The YAC spent a year researching and considering who else had made significant contributions to science, but who was not represented, and how they might be. Collectively, the group landed on Katherine Johnson, the pioneering mathematician who figured out the paths for the first NASA spacecraft to orbit earth and to land on the moon, but who was also impacted by racism and sexism. When the YAC decided to rename a room in the science center for Johnson, they created the signage for the room, changed its color scheme, and hung a photograph of the mathematician in the space, communicating her story through different design elements. Today, the Katherine Johnson Room has become a prominent community space, hosting groups and classes. It’s where everyone wants to have their birthday.

Justice,” at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Meeting. Their guiding questions were: “How does the science center maintain injustices such as racism?

What design actions can we take to make our science center more humanizing and just for minoritized communities?” Reviewing the participatory design-based research the group had done since 2016 to reclaim the science center “from colonial, white, heteropatriarchal histories,” the presentation highlighted how the YAC had made space for youth to take back power over how their lives, histories, stories, and communities are represented.

“The youth were able to present to other youth teams from across the country, and around the world,” says Calabrese Barton.

“The local work they had done felt significant in that they could see that they were changing not just the physical space of the science center, but also the practices that take place there, the expectations and the hopes. At the same time, they were learning about themselves, and issues of justice in STEM. Going to AERA helped them see that other people outside their community are interested in these issues and can learn from them. It gave them a whole different scale to see that their work had deep significance beyond just the Lansing community.”

Structural inequality in education is prevalent, and hard to fix. For an example, Calabrese Barton points to the difference between a high school in an affluent suburb and one in the city of Lansing. One offers 22 different science courses, where the other offers just seven—those that cover the basic requirements for graduation—because that’s all the school has the resources to provide.

“Systemic inequities are hard to fix in the moment, and kids are living their lives in the moment. What else can we do?” she asks.

“The YAC has been able to provide enrichment and compensatory experiences to the youth—they’re doing action research, they’re writing and publishing papers, they’re presenting at conferences. They’re seeing how their research makes a difference in the here and now in the actual design of spaces and in the lives of real people. That’s going to make a huge difference, and open up new opportunities for them, beyond what they are able to get in high school.” ■

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Providing Space for Native Youth to Connect with Their Identities While Navigating K–12 Public Schools The Indigenous Youth Education Collective is a youth participatory action research project led by—and for— Anishinaabe scholars, community members, and students

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ake Superior State University (LSSU) is over 300 miles and a world away from the University of Michigan, but they both have important roles to play in supporting Native students in our state. Working together in a research-practice partnership, these universities leverage the resources of Indigenous communities and research institutions to create a space for Native teens to connect with their identities and explore academic interests.

Located in Sault Ste. Marie in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, LSSU has around 2,000 students, and history stretching back to the 1940s. It is also the site of a unique community-driven research-practice partnership developed by Dr. Chloe Kannan (AB ’10), Assistant Professor of Education at LSSU and Jennifer Dale-Burton, an Anishinaabe elder who serves as editor of Win Awenen Nisitotung, the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians community newspaper, and a member of the

tribe’s Conservation and Food Sovereignty committees. This program, the Indigenous Youth Education Collective, is a youth participatory action research project led by—and for—Anishinaabe scholars, community members, and students.

The Anishinaabe are a group of culturally related Indigenous peoples present in the Great Lakes region of Canada and the United States. Kannan, herself a member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in sociology.

“I look around at the realities that led to my grandfather dropping out between the seventh and eighth grade,” Kannan explains. “I’m a first-generation college student, and I know how hard it was for me not knowing those systems. I’m seeing these kinds of deficit orientations around being Native from my own students, or being embarrassed of who they are. So I thought, what would happen if we create a space for Native teens

Photo provided by Lake Superior State University

“The research shows if you can support young students and help them envision what is possible you increase their likelihood of college attendance.

We’re doing that, but it’s not divorced from their cultural identities. On the contrary, it’s strongly linked.”

Dr. Jeremy Wright-Kim Research Grant Program. The RISE (Research for Indigenous Social action and Equity) Center at the University of Michigan is a multidisciplinary collaborative of humanists and humanistic social scientists dedicated to undoing Indigenous inequalities. The center connects researchers, artists, and activists to develop innovative ways of putting research into action to achieve equity for Indigenous Peoples throughout society. RISE grants support research projects that advance the center’s goal of propagating accurate, expansive, and empowering narratives of Indigenous peoples by Indigenous peoples.

“After I graduated from Penn I came back to Michigan,” Kannan says. “I knew Michigan, but I didn’t have the chance to grow up in my tribal homeland. My mom was born here, but then they left because there was no work. I made a promise to my grandma that I would come back to try to make a difference here before she passed away.

And so I came here and I became really involved in tribal community work.”

Kannan explains that she “started as a K-8 instructional coach. But during COVID, the schools were short staffed. So I stepped up to teach in the middle school, and it ended up being a gift because I got to know these students well. I knew their families—that’s the other thing when you’re in education more broadly, but also in a Native community—you really get to know the families in our work. So I was able to reach out to the families,

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you increase their likelihood of college attendance.

We’re doing that, but it’s not divorced from their cultural identities. On the contrary, it’s strongly linked. The research suggests that when students can reflect on their cultural and individual identities and understand how those influence their experiences, especially education, then they’re more likely to succeed.”

The initial pilot year of the program has been supported by funding from the RISE Indigenous

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to explore and understand both their cultural role and academic possibilities, to better connect with their Native identities, and to create a safe space that helps affirm who they are? What would happen if we create a space to help students grapple with being a Native student in K-12 public schools and help them find their pathway toward college? And what would happen if they learned how to be researchers together and worked on collective issues of change in their community?

“I believe that research-practice partnerships are the pathway to do that,” Kannan continues. “Not just because of access to faculty, but because these students get to feel part of a group that is with the University of Michigan and LSSU and they get to see themselves in college and in higher education, and they can see themselves as part of that in their cultural roles.”

When Kannan began the project with DaleBurton, she enlisted Dr. Jeremy Wright-Kim, a friend from graduate school, to be her collaborator.

“Jeremy and I went to Penn together. We were doctoral students there and we were both interested in issues of higher education,” she says.

“I talked with Jeremy and said, we need to try something here. Would you be willing to team up?

We need someone with strong higher education knowledge and access.”

Wright-Kim is an assistant professor in the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education at the Marsal Family School of Education whose scholarship examines the role and impact of public policy in addressing and/or perpetuating structural inequities in American higher education.

Initially developed as a yearlong pilot study, the project brings community members and Indigenous knowledge keepers together with researchers to engage in coalitional work with sixth to tenth grade Native youth. This work supports their learning of Indigenous ways, helps revitalize community knowledge that has been lost, and allows students to better connect with their Native identities while navigating K-12 and higher education spaces.

“You might think about our group in two ways,” Wright-Kim says, “although they’re inextricably linked. We’re looking at cultural engagement, cultural identity, and what it means to be Native.

The research shows if you can support young students and help them envision what is possible

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the parents, the students, and talk to them.

That’s how I recruited the first batch for our program. If you ask the kids, they would tell you they were not friends at the beginning of all of this, but now they’re a family.”

“We know that Native students really have historically been oppressed and under-supported by our educational institutions,” Wright-Kim adds. “We also know that engaging in this type of work is generative, helping students identify college-going identities and personalities.

And so, what we’re really doing is working to construct an experience that is supportive of these students along those lines.”

One thing that Kannan learned from being involved with the community is that “there are a lot of concerns from families and from students around extinction of culture.

Obviously in Michigan we have all these federally recognized tribes. But we still are looking at the history of boarding schools which has impacted all of us in various ways. And that legacy, that horrific trauma, has been long-lasting.

would empower participants and their community for local change.

Wright-Kim explains that during the pilot year of the program “it was a weekly engagement where Native youth could come to the program. They would reflect, they would engage in talking circles, they would have support and be engaged in cultural opportunities alongside the community—attending ceremonies, or a sweat lodge, for example. But feeling supportive and supported in their engagement in their Native identities was a really

“I think to help all Native students, we need to be doing a better job as a collective of all these institutions in Michigan to give access to students more broadly . . . because we are failing.” Dr. Chloe Kannan “People weren’t even able to practice ceremonies until the 1970s,” Kannan continues, “so we’ve had to survive a lot.

Students in these assimilation practices have lost access to their cultural identity and cultural roles. So people would need to have funerals and there were no Firekeepers.

I was looking around ceremonies and there were no students. I’m worried about what happens when our healers pass away— who’s going to come behind them? So you have that in tandem with students who either don’t want to go to college or don’t know how to get into college, or are thinking about dropping out of school—and the dropout rate among Native American students is extremely high.”

Through weekly meetings in a co-generative space, the Indigenous Youth Education Collective constructs deliverables and research products directly tied to students’ educational experiences and guides students toward designing studies that

big part of that weekly programming.

It also gave them a time to talk about their experiences among one another—finding community in the micro- and macroaggressions that they’re experiencing, the ways in which they’re viewing harm in educational spaces, and then empowering them with the research skills to interrogate what that looks like.”

Kannan notes that “these conversations wouldn’t be happening amongst my students unless this space existed for them.

“All of our students had summer programs or summer opportunities or internships,” she continues. “One of our students had an independent research internship at the University of Michigan because of this group. Being at the University of Michigan is really generative, and it also provides possibility. There are going to be some kids in our program for whom LSSU is the right place for them.

It’s a great rural institution. It’s small, it’s

individualized. It’s really amazing. And for some of our kids, University of Michigan is a great fit. I think to help all Native students, we need to be doing a better job as a collective of all these institutions in Michigan to give access to students more broadly—because whether they’re at LSSU or University of Michigan or Michigan State or Central or Oakland, we’ve got to be doing more to support Native students, because we are failing.

“In education research, we need to be having more room for research practice partnerships,” Kannan says, “and I think institutions need to be encouraging this.

Otherwise, we’re not going to be able to do the kind of community impact work and the research that’s actually going to create meaningful change in communities. It also encourages us when you have these kinds of partnerships—I’m all the way up in the UP and Jeremy’s down in Ann Arbor. It encourages communication and collaboration and not us just being siloed in what’s going on with Native students and what’s happening in higher education.”

So far, the pilot year of the program appears to be having an impact. “We have students who now know that they want to become Firekeepers who are receiving firekeeping teachings, we have a student who’s on his way to becoming a healer,” Kannan says. “And I’ve had students in my group who didn’t want to go to college who now say, ‘I want to go.’ Students who have a better idea of what they want to do in college, who now know that they want—will push their colleges to have—more offerings for Native students: ‘They better have the Ojibwe language. We better have Native faculty. There better be supports that are designed for Native students.’” ■

cator preparation courses. Together, Shalaby and Saunders sketched out a plan for a minor that was designed to explore the critical role education plays in building our individual and collective capacity to advance the aims of democracy and justice in civil society. It would be the right balance of theory and practice. The intended audience was undergraduates majoring in a liberal arts discipline who wanted to explore the intersections of that discipline and the work of education—that is, learning and teaching, broadly defined—in a range of diverse roles and contexts.

Five years and over 100 graduates later, the minor has been chosen by students representing 40 different majors across the university. Students have hailed from the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, the College of Engineering, the School of Nursing, and the Stamps School of Art and Design, among many others.

Minor students grapple with such questions as: What is the relationship, both historically and currently, between education and power; how do individuals, communities, organizations, and societies leverage learning and teaching as necessary tools for social change; and beyond schools and classrooms, what are the sites of educational and youth work that offer opportunities to advance justice in public life?

Along with 15 credit hours and a capstone project, an internship is key to completion of the Education for Empowerment minor.

The goal of the internship is to give students practical experience in education work.

This work can be conducted in both formal and informal education settings and can be dedicated to the educational experience of children, youth, or adults.

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understanding that that’s educative work.”

That’s why Shalaby and then-Associate Dean for Undergraduate and Teacher Education Shari Saunders mapped out what would become the Education for Empowerment minor. As Shalaby explains, their goal was “to try to capture this population of students who want to work in the field of learning and teaching, but don’t want to necessarily be classroom teachers.”

The minor itself was a first for the Marsal School, which had previously focused its undergraduate offerings exclusively on edu-

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aunched in 2018, the Education for Empowerment minor was born of a simple observation.

“We realized there were a number of students across our campus who were doing the work of education, but outside of teaching,” recalls Carla Shalaby, Coordinator of Social Justice Initiatives and Community Internships. “They were working with children, youth, and families in out-of-school settings—sometimes even in school settings— but without any training or expertise in how to do that well, and without any real clear

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Education for Empowerment Minor Internships Inspire Diverse Career Trajectories

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22 Drawing from a robust network of relationships with area organizations, Academic Advisor and Internship Coordinator Tim Golden works with students to place them in internships based on their interests. Sunny Liu (BS ’23), who was majoring in economics, undertook the minor to “balance out” his STEM-focused studies with classes in the humanities. For his internship, Golden suggested he might enjoy working with children in the after-school program at Community Action Network (CAN). At first, recalls Liu, he was just focused on fulfilling his internship requirement. “But then as I kept working, I couldn’t help but be a part of that community.” He admired how the leader of the program treated the children as if they were her own. Through observation and practice, Liu learned how to effectively manage a classroom.

“You didn’t have to always be super nice and you didn’t have to always be super straight, you just had to be you,” he recalls.

Liu’s supervisors at CAN noticed how invested he had become. When the internship was over, they offered him a paid position working in the organization’s food pantry.

“It was such an eclectic mix of people, and we all just loved talking. It genuinely felt like a big family. Every time we made a bag of

food for a family, they really cared, like making sure each bag had milk and eggs because we don’t want anyone to go without milk and eggs. It taught me so much about what it means to care about your job,” says Liu. As his graduation date neared, Liu applied for a business associate position with a charter school network in New York. But when the organization saw the Education for Empowerment minor on his resume, as well as the classroom experience he had gained through his internship at CAN, they asked if he would like to be a teacher instead. This fall, Liu began his career teaching eighth grade biology in the Bronx.

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iu’s story illustrates exactly what Shalaby had suspected might happen when she and Saunders mapped out the minor.

“We have a population of undergrads who really do want to become classroom teachers, but who fight that decision for a long time,” she says. “We’ve been able to capture those people initially through the minor.

And we hope that perhaps in working with children, they come to pursue the path of teaching.”

Rather than receive an internship placement, some students in the minor create their own internship opportunity. Valeria Guzman-Barrientos (anticipated AB ’24) is a linguistics major in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts who plans to become a speech pathologist. She was drawn to the minor because she wants to work in school settings. Through a class called CommunityEngaged Learning in English as a Second Language Teaching Contexts, she was able to work one on one with a current English Learner (EL) student in the Ann Arbor Public School district, and had the opportunity to speak with AAPS Director of

English Learner Programs Huda Harajli.

Guzman-Barrientos was impressed by how seriously and thoughtfully Harajli took her questions about the field into consideration.

“It made me feel like she actually cared about the students that were in EL, which isn’t always the case. They’re usually an afterthought. I speak from experience, because I was in EL when I was in elementary school,” says Guzman-Barrientos.

The next semester, she contacted Harajli to ask if she could intern in her office for the school district. In this role, GuzmanBarrientos helped coordinate an annual resource fair for new immigrant families.

She compiled a comprehensive list of resources for housing, food, health, and mental health and employed her graphic design skills to share the resources on flyers.

Working with the school district’s translation services department, she printed the flyers in different languages so that they would be easily accessible to incoming families.

“I think it was really important for me to have the internship because in the classes that I was taking, I was becoming a bit disillusioned with the system. It’s very easy to see that there are all these issues, but how am I as an individual going to be able to fix them? Just being able to take part in this one thing where maybe one of these resources or one flyer helps a family—it felt like bridging that gap of privilege a bit. It made me see that actually, there are a lot of things we can do to help reduce disparities in education without having to be directly working with policy or teaching in the classroom.”

At the outset, says Shalaby, “our primary commitment was leveraging our undergrads in the pursuit of serving kids and families toward advancing justice.” Every internship that is approved must seek to advance justice. “We wanted to make sure students got both coursework that would support their understanding of critical issues around oppression and justice, and that then they would get to be in an internship where in real time they would see the impact of those injustices on everyday people and figure out ‘What are my skills and talents to intervene on those?’”

Auriana Leismer (AB ’22) interned as a program assistant in a summer program at Bryant Community Center (which is also part of CAN). This was during the first summer of the pandemic, so the camp was held in a

“It made me see that actually, there are a lot of things we can do to help reduce disparities in education without having to be directly working with policy or teaching in the classroom.”

Valeria Guzman-Barrientos hybrid setting, affording Leismer her first experience teaching on Zoom. She worked with a group of third graders, meeting them outside the community center several times a week for nature walks. When the school year began, she stayed on with the organization, shifting into a tutoring role to offer homework help and literacy support for upper elementary and middle school students.

Leismer, who came to U-M specifically to study education, says that “the minor laid the groundwork for my philosophy of education.

It was the first time that I heard the term

the empowerment of children, youth, and adults. This reflection is illustrated in their capstone project, a multimedia presentation that demonstrates their learning about education for empowerment.

“The minor gave me a lot of practice in talking about education and all of the different elements and factors that go into and affect education—in a global context, but in a local context as well,” says Leismer who notes that it shaped the rest of her undergraduate study and formed the foundation for how she approaches leading and facili-

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tating discussions as an educator.

Upon graduating, she continued on at the Marsal School in the Master of Arts with Elementary Teacher Certification program.

This fall, she is working in a local middle school providing English Language support.

“The minor,” says Leismer, “set me up for how I go about my teaching practice.”

“Our position is that education is an interdisciplinary field,” says Shalaby. She recalls a nursing student who interned in a pediatric cancer center supporting kids and families.

After observing that kids were sometimes acted upon without having the full support of someone who sat at the intersection of medicine and education, she dedicated herself to making sure kids were meaningfully educated about their diagnosis. Over the years, several students have interned at The School at Marygrove (TSM), as an extension of the Marsal School’s involvement in the Detroit P-20 Partnership. A College of Engineering student helped to develop TSM’s first high school engineering curriculum. A student from the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning attended architectural planning meetings to help redesign the elementary school.

“Sometimes you have one small interaction in an internship, and it helps a young person figure out what they want to do with their life, and what they’re most passionate about. That’s something you can’t always capture in a classroom,” says Shalaby. “You’re not going to get that necessarily from reading something, but you do get that from the relationships that you form in a field-based experience. I can’t imagine the minor without the internship piece. We want to graduate students who realize that relationships are at the core of all education work.” ■

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‘opportunity gap’ rather than ‘achievement gap.’

That reframing made me realize I needed to think about my own identities and how those relate to my positionality within larger society and how that is going to affect how I go about teaching.”

Students in the minor choose to pursue one of four learning pathways: Advancing Equity Through Education Policy; Children and Youth in Context: Culture, Communities, and Education; Design Your Own Pathway; and Education in a Global Context, which Leismer chose. Once their coursework and internship are completed, students are asked to consider their learning across all their courses and reflect on how the totality of their experiences inform their thinking about the role of education in

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Back on the Road Again After a pandemic pause, CSHPE experiential learning trips return

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The group at the University of California, Berkeley

The Itinerary The group’s first visit was to the University of California, Berkeley, where they were introduced to the Basic Needs Center, which provides holistic support to students and community members by addressing food and housing security and financial needs. In addition to a food pantry, the center also offers one-on-one nutritional counseling and assistance applying for CalFresh and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

system-impacted individuals into higher education.

Participants shared personal stories about the connections BUS had afforded them—assistance in landing professional opportunities, securing housing, and learning about self-care.

At a meeting with the Berkeley Underground Scholars (BUS) the group met the community of scholars and activists who work to create a pathway for incarcerated, formerly incarcerated, and CSHPE alum and Oakland native Joshua Lee (AM ’12) introduced the group to the East Bay Community Foundation (EBCF) where he is a senior program officer. By practicing trust-based philanthropy (which forgoes a grant application process) the organization invests in issues including housing insecurity, education, and climate justice

while centering the needs of communities impacted by systems of oppression.

To gain more context for how gentrification and urban renewal has impacted communities who have long existed in the San Francisco Bay Area, the group took the Black Liberation Walking Tour of Oakland where they learned about the historically Black Hoover-Foster neighborhood.

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dynamics at play in the Bay Area that distinguish it from the rest of the state. As well, the group would observe the forces that shape and constrain how the Bay Area operates. Drawing on connections with former colleagues and CSHPE alumni who now work in the region, Perez and Richardson organized a 10-day itinerary that would include visiting philanthropic organizations, community colleges, elite institutions, and a community walking tour. Policy would be a main focus of their study.

As the faculty lead, Perez hoped the experiential content of the course would appeal both to students whose course of study focuses on policy, and those who might not feel so directly connected to it as a subject area.

“Often when we talk about policy, we frame it primarily through federal and state lenses. Often, we’re talking about legislators,” says Perez. With this trip, she wanted to explore policy implementation with a variety of stakeholders. “We’re all affected by policy, but how do you make it accessible?”

Although her own research is not in public policy, Perez notes that her research exploring individual and organizational learning and development in collegiate contexts is of consequence to policymakers and at the institutional level. “Policies are not just made by the government: policies are also made by institutions of higher education. We really tried to think through how both are of consequence to students, faculty, staff, teachers, and community members.”

Offered for the first time as a credit-bearing course in the spring

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elinda Richardson, Managing Director of the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education (CSHPE), loves watching students have “aha!” moments.

“Those quiet moments where a student will turn to you as you’re walking down the sidewalk after a site visit, or say to you over breakfast in this off-the-cuff way, ‘Wow I didn’t realize that.

I’d never thought about that before.’”

Since 2013, Richardson has worked with various faculty members to organize CSHPE’s experiential learning program, which comprises annual domestic and international trips that augment coursework by expanding students’ understanding of higher education beyond their own experience as undergraduate and graduate students. In that time, groups have traveled to South Africa, Chile, and England, as well as visited tribal colleges and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in the U.S. In 2020, Richardson was looking forward to taking a group to Washington, DC for an excursion that would focus on HBCUs and federal education policy when the pandemic halted all travel plans. It wasn’t until this spring that Richardson—along with Associate Professor Rosemary Perez and 11 CSHPE master’s and doctoral students—hit the road again.

Their destination? The San Francisco Bay Area.

Perez, who had worked at the University of San Francisco earlier in her career, was familiar with the higher education context in California. She looked forward to sharing with students the distinct

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26 term, the trip was hardly a vacation. It explored how advocacy, service, and community partnerships, combined with sound data and research practices, inform and shape public policy in the microcosm of the San Francisco Bay Area. As part of their learning experience, the group met with decision-makers and policy influencers, considered a range of timely higher education issues being addressed at a variety of institutions, learned from community members about their experiences, and honed skills as policy influencers and change agents. Along the way, students contextualized their conversations within the fabric of the San Francisco Bay Area’s diverse population.

In addition to being present and engaged at the meetings and presentations throughout the trip, each student was assigned a site for which they would serve as the subject expert. In advance of their travels, students researched and prepared questions in order to foster meaningful engagement between the group and their hosts.

After the site visit, the designated lead student wrote a blog post for

At the Public Policy Institute of California, the group gained insight into how the nonpartisan think tank focuses on California-specific issues and provides objective empirical inquiries. Students learned about how the institute chooses its research topics, its current research regarding dual enrollment and FAFSA completion rates, its methods of data access and collection, the channels it uses to inform policy, and its collaboration with partners.

At City College-Chinatown/North Beach, Interim Vice Chancellor of Academic and Institutional Affairs and CSHPE alum Geisce Ly (PhD ’09) hosted a conversation among fellow Bay Area community college leaders centering on leadership and governance in California’s community college system. The group also heard from City College student Nhi Pham, who attested to the supportive nature of the institution that helped her learn English, build confidence, develop a supportive community, fill out job applications, and pursue her dream of becoming a teacher.

At San Francisco State University, the group met with the chair and faculty members of the school’s Race and Resistance Studies depart-

“We had students try to make sense of ‘What does this mean for you? What are your key takeaways and what are you going to do in your own practice?’”

Rosemary Perez the course website, reporting on key impressions and takeaways that shed light on their previous understanding of the topic at hand.

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uilding meaning across the breadth of organizations and people the group encountered happened formally and informally throughout the trip. As for the “aha!” moments: sometimes, Richardson says, a student has a revelation walking back to the van after a site visit. Perez also built in time for the group to reflect throughout their 10 days together.

researchers to generate pressure on policymakers and decision makers to make informed decisions that will serve the public well.”

ment, which was recently restructured to explore the history of incarceration in the United States, examine comparative relational work, and embody liberation studies for Students and Communities of Color. They were also treated to a panel discussion among San Francisco State University student affairs administrators. “The occasion to hear from others about their varied career trajectories comes at an opportune point in our study program,” wrote doctoral student Alex Cabrera.

At Stanford University, the group was welcomed

by Associate Director of Educational Programs and CSHPE alum Angie Hawkins (AM ’08). Hawkins led a panel discussion with deans from the Graduate Life Office, which holistically assists graduate students in navigating situations ranging from family and health concerns to academic challenges to financial difficulties.

The Hewlett Foundation’s Program Director of Education Kent McGuire discussed how the foundation and others in the education sector must

approach issues like public dissemination and institutional change in new ways. This spurred master’s student Meghan Krawczyk to note that “funding can provide resources to grassroots organizations or

To foster a more nuanced understanding of gentrification and its impact on the East Palo Alto neighborhood where Stanford University is located, the group heard from community members including Hawkins; Melvin Gaines, East Palo Alto City Manager; Laura Martinez, former mayor of East Palo Alto; and East Palo Alto lifetime resident Marquisa Hawkins.

While visiting the Office of the President of the University of California, students heard from several administrators about the process of creating a new policy that was prompted by passage of the California Gender Recognition Act (SB 179) in 2017.

The policy, which was developed with community input, allows students to update their names in all university systems to reflect their lived name, as well

A visit to Laney College (a community college in Oakland) introduced the group to Restoring Our Communities, a program that provides holistic support to formerly incarcerated students.

Led by staff (several of whom were formerly incarcerated themselves) who have developed multiple approaches to supporting student success, the program offers peer mentoring, staff advising, academic counseling, informal tutoring, and support with transferring to other institutions. as the introduction of three gender options which are required on forms, instead of a gender binary.

This made a big impression on master’s student Wynter Douglas, who wrote, “The UC system is the third largest employer in the whole state of California, so the policies they enact have a big impact on state law.… As a Trans Nonbinary person, it was very special to be able to be at this panel and to ask questions and understand how to push these types of policies to exist within higher ed.”

To wrap up their journey, the group met with CSHPE alum Dr. Chris Nellum (PhD ’14), Executive Director of The Education Trust West, a nonprofit educational equity organization focused on educational justice and closing achievement and opportunity gaps from preschool through college through research, data, policy analysis, and advocacy.

CSHPE students participated in the Trust’s Data Equity Walk, which engages participants with education data and encourages the discussion of equity issues. Dianna Torres (AM ’23) wrote that the visit offered an understanding of how the Education Trust West is able to push policy forward by “shining a light on the importance of creating partnerships with organizations and people at different levels.

It was refreshing to see an organization take action while incorporating the greater community.”

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what? Let’s translate this into real life. That’s what you’re going to be doing at work. It’s not as simple as it looks on paper.”

Meeting with CSHPE alumni—including former director Marvin Peterson—also demonstrated the breadth of the program’s impact in the field. “For our current students to see Chris Nellum of Education Trust West walk into the room and give Rosie a big hug, and give me a big hug, they see that alumni are supportive of both current students and each other. Being a part of the CSHPE network is both very powerful and a real privilege,” said Richardson.

Perez hoped it was enlightening for students to see faculty members in a different context—among former colleagues and friends.

“For them to see us at SF State and see me with my colleague Alvin, who I’ve been friends with for 20 years, they saw that in this field you can do this work and stay really connected to colleagues across space and time. It’s the relationship, the care. That’s what allows us to still talk about policy 20 years later.” ■

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“We had students try to make sense of ‘What does this mean for you? What are your key takeaways and what are you going to do in your own practice?’” she says.

At the end of the trip, students were required to write a reflection piece, taking into account all that they had observed over the 10 days, and what those experiences brought to bear on their understanding of higher education and their role as practitioners in that space.

Experiential learning, says Perez, “makes things that you read and talk about come to life. I think sometimes in the academy, particularly at elite institutions, everything is much more in our head and we have idealized versions of what should happen. We have theoretical and empirically demonstrated things that we think other people should be doing when we might not have the experience to make those critiques fair or think about the implementation or the constraints. We might not have the nuance to really think about what this looks like in real life. So I always push my students on, well, so

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Beyond the Classroom and Into Extended Reality A new series of online courses has the potential to reach future learning experience designers everywhere

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itting at the nexus of design, learning theory, and educational technology, the field of Learning Experience Design (LXD) produces virtual and technology-enhanced learning environments that are employed across a range of industries, as well as right here at the University of Michigan. (Think Teach Outs and massive open online courses, or MOOCs.) With demand for talented learning experience designers showing up everywhere from corporate training programs to the National Football League, the Marsal Family School of Education and the University of Michigan’s Center for Academic Innovation (CAI) teamed up to offer the LXD Graduate Certificate Program, a 12-credit certificate available to any U-M graduate student.

Now in its fifth year, the LXD Certificate Program is co-directed by Marsal School Associate Professor of Education Christopher Quintana and Dr. Rebecca Quintana, Director of Blended and Online Learning Design for CAI and a Marsal School adjunct lecturer. The certificate combines academic courses on learning theory, curriculum design, multimodal literacies, evaluation, and research design. The hallmark of the program is a residency—or internship—in which students are afforded the unique opportunity of working alongside professional learning experience designers, media

designers, and other partners and stakeholders on authentic design opportunities as they engage in a number of projects at CAI. CAI works with all 19 Ann Arbor schools and colleges across the university, so the range of learning experiences it creates is vast. Over the years, residents have helped design courses that are available on Michigan Online, including Emotional Intelligence: Cultivating Immensely Human Interactions, which explores important intra- and interpersonal skills for thriving in the workplace, and Problem Solving Using Computational Thinking, which explores how to take complex problems, understand what the problem is, and develop solutions in a way that people and computers can understand. However, says Rebecca Quintana, “The residency program can only accommodate a limited number of students per academic year because of the number of projects we can take on here at CAI, and the number of learning experience designers students will be working alongside. We’ve always felt somewhat limited by that, and we want to be able to expand our reach. We think we’ve developed a really good program, a good curriculum, one that we want to be able to share more broadly.”

Since the launch of the program, the Quintanas have fielded many requests from students within the university—and from

professionals beyond—who are interested in the LXD certificate. To serve this audience, the Quintanas (along with students from three previous certificate cohorts) have developed An Introduction to Learning Experience Design, a three-course MOOC series that will provide an introduction to the field of LXD and the contemporary applications of LXD. Through the course, learners will grasp the fundamentals of the LXD process and become equipped to apply these concepts in real-world projects.

The three-part series, offered on Coursera, will explain how LXD is related to other types of design, such as instructional design.

It will describe key concepts related to LXD, such as design approaches, theories of learning, and evidence-based approaches to instruction. The course will describe the range of “core competencies” with which LXD professionals should be fluent, including the areas of learning theory and motivation, design, assessment, and evaluation, perspectives on designing for diversity and inclusion (e.g., Universal Design for Learning, Culturally Responsive Design), project development and management, and interpersonal and leadership skills.

“It will give our audience of learners a good set of key topics that they know they will need to continue to develop and learn about as they move into the profession,” says

How It Works:

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They are able to click on artifacts on the wall to see a zoomed in version of the artifacts the project team is using before taking their seat at the table.

MOOC learners introduce themselves as a new LXD to the other members of the project team.

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As the virtual project meeting starts, MOOC learners can see who the other members of the project team are and what they do, such as the “faculty stakeholder”.

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At the end of the virtual project meeting, MOOC learners are prompted to reflect on the meeting they were just part of to think about the role that the team’s LXD played in the meeting.

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The MOOC learner walks into an empty meeting room

create these experiences. The learner can view them if they have a headset—as they move their head, they’re moving around the conference room where they’re having their project meeting.” Learners can also access the Uptale experiences on a phone. Using the phone as a viewer, users can see the conference room space, and interact with it.

Although it will be a slightly different interaction, a computer can be used as well.

“We don’t want to limit this to just people who own headsets, because that’s going to be a very small population,” says Christopher.

“The Uptale tool allows us to create these immersive experiences on different platforms so that students can access them in any way they want.”

Made with 360° cameras not much larger than an iPhone, the videos are able to capture the full range of an environment, giving learners the experience of being in a project conference room. They can walk in, look around, and read artifacts on the wall that the team is working with. The LXD team will even come in and interact with the learner.

“360° video lets our students interact and feel what it’s like to be in a place,” says Christopher. In one scenario, a learner is situated in the conference room as the project team comes into work. “You’re able to hear what the conversations are like in the project meeting.”

As this new technology becomes available, faculty are starting to brainstorm ideas for how it could be used to enhance their students’ learning. Christopher says that the U-M School of Dentistry created a learning experience where students can explore a virtual dental office. “Dental students can walk around the teeth and look at them in new ways because the virtual stage allows for that.” For medical students, he muses, XR could be used to give a lesson on the heart as the professor delivers the lecture from inside a virtual representation of the muscle. Or it could be used to show data in a new way. “We look at data and graphs, but what if I could create these more understandable 3-D representations of what the data means in a VR environment?”

Of course, to make these virtual learning opportunities possible, we’ll need more learning experience designers. Luckily, An Introduction to Learning Experience Design launches on Coursera in January 2024. ■

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Rebecca. “In the MOOC, we encourage learners to be reflective of their own abilities or skill sets and identify others where they may need to grow through self-study or through self-directed learning.”

In addition to those seeking a pathway to become learning experience designers, potential MOOC learners might be classroom teachers who have become interested in virtual teaching capabilities since adapting to remote learning during the pandemic or college teachers who are eager to learn more about using technology to support learning.

Perhaps fittingly, designing the course has been an opportunity to explore new types of learning technologies. The Quintanas knew that as an open online course, it wouldn’t offer their global audience of learners the same in-depth experiences afforded in the certificate program— namely the residency component. But they realized they could simulate experiential education by using extended reality (XR) elements, like 360° videos.

“You don’t see a lot of extended reality in online learning. It’s a bit of an experiment,” says Christopher. “We’re using it to create these vignettes where we put the MOOC learner in a project meeting or in a meeting with a faculty member they’re working with.

You, as the MOOC learner, are watching a video, but it’s from your perspective. You’re in the meeting, you’re learning about all the roles on the design team.”

The 360° videos are shot in the conference rooms where project meetings occur to give students a feel for those meetings. An Introduction to Learning Experience Design will be one of the first courses the center has produced that uses this type of technology.

“It’s at the cutting edge of this type of work,” says Rebecca. “We don’t have a lot of examples out there of MOOCs that have an immersive component to them.”

The MOOC is included in CAI’s new Michigan Online Future of Work Academy, one of 10 courses wherein learners will be able to develop skills critical to the future of work and society. The courses leverage XR technology to provide a level of immersion only possible in virtual, mixed, and augmented reality environments.

“When people hear ‘extended reality’ or ‘virtual reality,’ they immediately think you’re wearing a VR headset,” says Christopher.

“We’re using a tool called Uptale that lets us

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New Gifts, Endowments, and Bequests A

s a child, Marjorie Vaughan Barondes (AB ’52, TeachCert ’52) showed great talent as a violinist and as a Lightning sailing skipper. By the time she was a student at U-M, she was first chair, second violin in the university orchestra. But it was in the sailing club—not a concert hall—where she met her future husband, Arthur Barondes (MSE ’51), a West Point Air Force lieutenant and graduate student in aeronautical engineering. Marjorie and Arthur married in 1952, the same year she graduated from the School of Barondes Education with her bachelor’s degree and teaching certificate. Later that year, she began her teaching career at Nightingale Elementary School in Venice, California.

While Art was on active duty, Marjorie established their family on Air Force installations including Los Angeles, Alamogordo, Houston, Northern Virginia, Montgomery, and Grand Forks. As an Air Force wife, her opportunities to continue teaching full-time were limited, so she worked as a substitute teacher in elementary schools. In the 1960s, she continued her education at the University of Alabama, where she was invited to join their PhD program, but the family had to move again. When they settled in Virginia, Marjorie taught in Fairfax County for many years.

Coupling her passions for elementary education and the violin, she taught in elementary schools and as a strings teacher. She also found time to teach privately and play the violin in local symphonies.

“To Marjorie, a challenge—whether it was education, strings, or as a homemaker—was an invitation to excel. Based on her School of Education training, Marjorie was motivated to have her students and her four children achieve their potential,” says Art. “Teaching was her life’s work, and she did it very well.”

Marjorie credited what was then the School of Education with her success in the classroom, and enjoyed giving back to the school to help current students. “Giving back,” says Art, “has continued as a tradition in her memory.”

Art has given several gifts to honor Marjorie over the years, including one to name—and now renovate—the

Marjorie V. Barondes Conference Room in the Office of Student Affairs. Across the hall, another gift—the Marjorie V. Barondes Infinite Impact wall—recognizes outstanding educators. Most recently, the Marjorie Vaughan Barondes Scholarship will establish a scholarship for future educators in Marjorie’s memory.

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ven before she had kids of her own, Sharon “Sherri” Hyla (ABEd ’77, TeachCert ’77) always loved working with children, recalls her husband of 53 years, Jim Hyla (MedRes ’77, MedFellowship ’77).

The couple met when Jim was in medical school in Rochester, New York. Sherri was a substitute teacher and literacy volunteer. When she and Jim moved to Ann Arbor so he could pursue a rheumatology fellowship at U-M, Sherri enrolled at what was then the School of Education. With several years of experience working with students already under her belt, she thrived as she pursued her bachelor’s degree, enjoying her time at the school thoroughly.

She was a proud graduate of the Class of 1977, and later went on to earn her master’s degree in education from SUNY Oswego.

Over the course of her long career in the classroom, Sherri taught history in the City of Syracuse School District at both Grant Middle School and Henninger High School. Her favorite period to teach was the Civil War. As she often taught students for two years at a time, she grew close Hyla to her pupils, and over the summers invited the children to the camp the Hyla’s owned on Cazenovia Lake.

Although the Hylas returned to upstate New York after just a few years in Ann Arbor, Sherri remained deeply fond of the town and her time at the School of Education throughout her life. Before she passed away in 2022, she and Jim had discussed establishing a scholarship fund to support teacher education students at the Marsal School. Through the endowed Sharon “Sherri” Hyla Scholarship Fund, Jim hopes that Sherri’s love of teaching, and of kids, will be carried on by the next generation of teachers.

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hen Christine May (AB ’74, TeachCert ’74) began her studies at U-M as an undergraduate, she wasn’t thinking about the field of education.

May was set on pursuing a major in mathematics with a minor in political science. She hoped to one day work for the Gallup Poll organization. That all changed when she met Law School professor Layman E. Allen.

Allen was a pioneer in using mathematics as a logic tool. His interest in teaching mathematical logic to lawyers led to the development of instructional gaming. Allen’s Games for Thinkers—games about math and logic—included “Wff ‘n Proof,” “Equations,” and “Onsets.”

“I took an independent study to learn Allen’s games and discovered my passion for working with children,” says May. “I found that the games not only enhanced math education, but helped to develop deductive reasoning skills, or logic as well.”

After graduating with her teaching May certification, May went on to teach math in Troy, Michigan, and Lisbon, Ohio, before taking a break to raise her children, Andrew (MBA ’22) and Nicole (BS ’02, MHSA ’08). Once her daughter was in school, she decided to return to the classroom herself and earned her continuing certification through the University of Michigan. She spent the next 20 years at Berkley High School in Berkley, Michigan, and Oxford High School in Oxford, Michigan. Throughout the course of her career, she taught every math course from basic middle school mathematics to calculus.

Because of her earlier gaming experience while at U-M, May utilized strategies and techniques of discovery in her classroom routine. Additionally, May recognized the importance of clubs to support student classwork and stretch their knowledge and interest in math and science. She initiated multiple math/science clubs, and, along with her son Andrew, launched Berkley High School’s FIRST Robotics Club and Robotics Course.

It’s fitting that May met her husband Ron May (BSECiv ’73) in a math class at U-M. Now the couple have established the Ron & Christine May Family

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y the time Susan Schwartz Wildstrom (AB ’69, TeachCert ’69) and Stephen H. Wildstrom (AB ’69) were seniors at U-M, he had become managing editor of the Michigan Daily. Steve went on to have a successful career as a trailblazing tech journalist, until he passed away in 2015. Susan pursued her goal of becoming a mathematics teacher, and spent the next 50 years right where she had always wanted to be: in the classroom. As soon as they “could rub two nickels together,” says Susan, they gave to U-M. With the hope of encouraging teachers to join the profession, Wildstrom and enjoy it for as long as she did, Susan recently established the Stephen H. and Susan Schwartz Wildstrom Endowed Scholarship Fund in Mathematics.

For the majority of her career, Susan taught in Montgomery County, Maryland. She taught all levels of high school mathematics, including rapid learner pre-calculus, calculus, and a multi-variable calculus course she pioneered, called Math Seminar, which consisted of number theory and probabilities. On Fridays, she and her class had a great time doing contest problems.

“The one thing that was characteristic of my entire teaching career is that it was very important to me that the students got it—that they were able to be successful if they were willing to put in the effort,” says Susan. If they were stuck, she asked them where they got stuck. What did they understand? Where was the disconnect? “I was always looking for ways of telling them something I’d already said in a different way. I always wanted to find a way that they could understand.”

This, of course, stuck with her students, many of whom are still in touch. One turned to her for help brushing up on her calculus skills as she pursued a PhD in epidemiology. Others send their own children to her for tutoring.

“I always knew this is what I wanted to do,” says Susan. And over the course of her time in the classroom, she felt like she made a difference.

“I loved teaching every day of my 50 years.”

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r. Lin Chu Wong (AM ’80, PhD ’90) was born in New York City in 1929, the first of seven children to second- and third-generation Chinese American parents. She was raised during the Great Depression in the back of her parents’ Chinese laundry, where she worked every day after school. She was the first in her family to go to college, graduating with a bachelor’s degree from Hunter College in 1950.

Wong and her husband, James P. Wong (BArch ’54) raised their children in Ann Arbor. When their eldest enrolled at the University of Michigan, she went back to school herself to earn her master’s degree from what was then the School of Education. She went on to teach for many years in diverse school settings in the Ann Arbor Public Schools district, and in 1990 earned her PhD in education. She went on to contribute her ideas to the development of

• Wong (right) with Dean Moje

multicultural elementary education in her hometown, New York City, and served on the National Education Association’s Curriculum Committee in Washington, DC, where she helped write a national multicultural curriculum.

Wong has never forgotten her childhood experience of being the only Student of Color in the Queens, New York schools she attended through high school.

The discrimination she faced then made her determined to dedicate her teaching career to the education of minority and underserved students and to the development of multicultural education and curriculum studies.

“My mom is a model for us all, as a beloved parent and grandparent, and as a career educator,” says her eldest son, Jonathan Wong (ABEd ’80, TeachCert ’80). “My two brothers, my sister, and I reflected on how to acknowledge her life accomplishments and impact in the field of education so we decided to honor her devotion to education in Michigan by establishing an endowed scholarship for students who want to follow in my mother’s path.”

In recognition of Wong’s legacy of educating underserved students and her devotion to the University of Michigan, her children have created the Lin Chu Wong Endowed Scholarship to Promote Multicultural Education. The scholarship will be awarded each year to a University of Michigan Marsal Family School of Education undergraduate or graduate student whose studies or career aspirations are dedicated to the education of minority and underserved students. ■

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“We need talented people in science, math, and technology,” says Christine May. “It’s easy to take a different position outside of education. The pay is better. There are more perks.” But she hopes that the scholarship will help attract motivated students to the Marsal School to become educators. “When I finally decided to enter the teaching profession, it was because I had found my passion. It has been a lifelong dream of mine to provide scholarship funds to encourage and assist other individuals impassioned to help young minds develop and grow, while teaching students the skills to become lifelong learners. Ron, I, and our family are delighted to establish this fund for U-M’s Marsal Family School of Education.”

“My school was the first in our area to offer muli-variable calculus in a neighborhood public high school that didn’t have an IB program or wasn’t a computer science math magnet. We had to get permission from the county to do it,” recalls Susan.

In her first year, she had 15 students. By the time she retired, the school offered three sections of Math Seminar. Today, she says, nearly every high school in Montgomery County offers a multi-variable calculus course.

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Scholarship Fund, a scholarship that will support students at Marsal Education who are pursuing a teaching career in STEM.

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A Planned Gift Honors Generations Past and Benefits Generations to Come labs on subjects such as number theory, set theory, and the new geometry. This was an effort to which Alice, along with Payne and her teacher colleagues, devoted considerable time and focus. Although this would be her last position at U-M, the training she received paved the way for the rest of her career.

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Michael and Alice Chen

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r. Michael Graham Chen (BS ’58, MD ’62) and Alice Louie Chen’s (AB ’58, AM ’60) family legacy at the University of Michigan spans two continents and six generations. It began when Michael’s grandfather left China after the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 to study law at U-M with Professor J.B. Waite.

Following in his footsteps, Michael’s father, Dr. Graham Mien Chen (MS ’25, ScD ’30), came to the United States to pursue a PhD in chemistry at U-M. (Later, he went on to earn an MD from the University of Chicago.) Michael was born in China but was evacuated to Hawaii with his mother, Martha Choy Chen (ABEd ’28, TeachCert ’28, AM ’29, AM ’63), and sister Marcia Chen Langmack (MS ’57) during the Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937. They were raised in Detroit, where Michael attended Cass Technical High School. He enrolled at U-M to study chemistry and eventually attend medical school. It was there that he met fellow undergraduate Alice Louie, who had grown up in Cleveland, Ohio.

Alice was a member of Pi Beta Phi and was active in campus government. She was also passionate about mathematics—particularly the teaching

of mathematics—and was greatly influenced by Professor Joseph Neal Payne in the School of Education. Following her bachelor’s degree, Alice taught mathematics at Tappan Junior High School in Ann Arbor. Later, she pursued her master’s degree in mathematics at the Rackham Graduate School.

When the Chens moved to Brooklyn, New York for Michael’s internship at Kings County Medical Center, Alice taught at Edgemont High School in Scarsdale. During his military service at the Tripler Army Medical Center in Honolulu, Hawaii, Alice taught math at the University of Hawaii (Manoa).

In 1969, Michael earned a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. His subsequent residencies and professorships took their family to Oak Ridge, Tennessee; ​​Palo Alto, California; and New Haven, Connecticut, before settling in Rochester, Minnesota where he worked at the Mayo Clinic until his retirement in 2002. Throughout that time, Alice developed math labs in her children’s elementary schools and worked in programming at IBM, where she created word-processing programs for the writers of technical manuals.

All three of Michael’s sisters attended U-M. So, too, did Michael and Alice’s aunts, nieces, nephews, and cousins. Their daughter Laura Kim Chen (AB ’87)

“We are very heartened by the Marsal Family School of Education’s current efforts to train the teachers and professors of tomorrow and by the continued excellence of its faculty.”

In her last years in Ann Arbor, Alice worked closely with Payne at what was then the University School— the preK-12 school housed in what is today the Marsal School. She taught undergraduate education students and co-edited several algebra and geometry textbooks. At the time, recalls Alice, the United States was desperately trying to catch up with the Soviets in the areas of science and technology. One effort was to encourage high school and middle school mathematics teachers to learn and teach the “new math” through seminars and math

studied French at the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. (Their son Jonathan Michael Chen pursued his education and medical training at Yale University and Columbia University, respectively.)

Their granddaughter Camilla Kate Lizundia (AB ’20, AM ’22) is the sixth generation to carry on the family tradition, recently graduating with a master’s degree from the A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning.

Champions for Education

At the Marsal Family School of Education, the Alice Louie Chen Education Scholarship Fund will support undergraduate or graduate students who are pursuing their teacher certification and intend to become secondary math teachers, or those who plan to be practitioners of secondary education in another STEM field.

“We have always recognized the central role of mathematics in all scientific and technical endeavors,” says Alice. “We believe there is a need for trained mathematics educators at all levels.

Funds to encourage teachers specializing in teaching this discipline will enhance our society in many ways. We are very heartened by the Marsal Family School of Education’s current efforts to train the teachers and professors of tomorrow and by the continued excellence of its faculty.”

In addition to their planned gift, the Chens have committed to making cash gifts to their new endowed scholarship fund over the coming years and, in doing so, will take advantage of Marsal

$25,000 or greater. In the Chens’ case, the program will maximize the impact of their generous support.

Another part of their gift will honor Michael’s father, who was the first in a long line of Chens to graduate with a degree from U-M. The Graham Mien Chen Scholarship Fund at LSA will be used to provide need-based scholarship support to undergraduate students, with a focus on students majoring in chemistry. The Graham Mien Chen Graduate Student Support Fund at LSA will provide support to graduate students.

“The science of chemistry in all its forms has always been central to the physical and biological sciences,” says Michael. “The University of Michigan’s Department of Chemistry is a cornerstone of the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. It was an important start to my father Dr. Graham Mien Chen’s career in pharmacology, and to my professional journey in medicine.

Our family has had generations of association with the university, which continues today.

We would like to continue that tradition for others, particularly those beginning with a foundation in chemistry and moving on to careers in chemistry or other related disciplines.” ■

B

y making a planned gift, no matter how small or large, you’re leaving a legacy at the university and supporting the future of education.

To learn more about how you can provide for the Marsal Family School of Education in your estate plans, please contact Mike McBride, Associate Director of Development, at mmcbrid@umich.edu or Learn More: 734-647-3918.

Or scan the QR code to visit the university’s website that can help get you started in planning your legacy gift.

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T

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

Your support makes an immediate and lasting difference. ¡ Scan this code to access our donation website directly from your phone.

Online: leadersandbest.umich.edu Phone: 1.888.518.7888 Mail: Office of Development and Alumni Relations, Marsal Family 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 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

E d u ca t i o n

“We thought it was a very good concept to support people that really need the money when they need the money,” says Michael.

Education’s recently launched Empowering Educators Scholarship Matching Initiative. To incentivize longterm endowed support of education students while also accounting for the school’s immediate student support needs, particularly for students interested in teaching, Marsal Education is currently matching 1:2 (50 percent) all endowed scholarship gifts of

M ic h i g a n

This multigenerational legacy inspired the Chens— who are now in their eighties—to make a planned gift from their estate to the university that has provided an educational foundation for so many members of their family. All three funds that the gift has created are endowed, ensuring that they will be invested and thus able to provide support to U-M students in perpetuity.

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To submit class notes, update your contact information, communicate with the editor, or connect

In 2021, Luke Wilcox (BSEd ’01,

at Albany, SUNY, where he teaches

TeachCert ’01) co-founded the Math

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courses in social studies education,

Medic Foundation (MMF), a philanthropic

civic engagement, and educational

organization that grew out of Math

research methods. He also manages

Medic, a website that provides teachers

UAlbany’s secondary teacher

with high-quality lessons and engaging

education program. For the past 15

workshops with the aim of transform-

years, Levy has conducted research

ing math education. Fellow Marsal

on how educational programs can

School alum Sarah Stecher (AB ’17,

support civic engagement among

TeachCert ’17) now serves as the

diverse youth, and since 2020, he

Foundation’s Board Secretary. The

has produced a monthly podcast,

Foundation awards scholarships to

Education for Sustainable Democracy,

students pursuing math-related

that features interviews with civic

endeavors, provides grants to teachers

education innovators and experts from

for high-quality professional develop­

around the country. (All episodes can

ment, and supports schools that are in

be found for free at esdpodcast.org.)

need of math-related resources.

M ic h i g a n

Theory and Practice at the University

E d u ca t i o n

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with the Marsal Family School of Education, please visit marsal.umich.edu/magazine.

Naomi Ervin (PhD ’80) was honored to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award in Public Health Nursing from the Michigan Public Health Association, Public Health Nursing Section.

“As a long-time, active member of the Public Health Nursing Section of the Michigan Public Health Association, I appreciate this recognition from my colleagues and friends. I look forward to continuing my involvement in the organization. My education at U-M has served me well during the various positions I have held in Michigan, Illinois, and New York.”

Jeff Grim (PhD ’22) recently began a position as assistant professor of higher education at George Mason University in Northern Virginia. In this new role, Grim teaches classes to master’s and doctoral students on higher education organizations, policies, and student affairs administration.

In March 2023, Brett Levy (AM ’08, AM ’10, PhD ’11) was awarded the Benita Jorkasky Outstanding College Educator Memorial Award by the New York State Council for Social Studies.

Currently, he is an associate professor in the department of Educational

Stecher and Wilcox

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Connor David McMahon (ABEd ’21) was born on September 13, 1999.

A lifelong resident of Roseville, Michigan, he graduated from Fraser High School in 2017 and was an Early College of Macomb graduate in 2018.

McMahon was a proud 2021 alumnus of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Connor graduated with a degree in secondary education and a teaching certificate in social studies.

McMahon dedicated his life to teaching because of an extraordinary teacher he had. After putting himself through college, he returned to Fraser High School as a social studies teacher. At his graduation, McMahon inspired his classmates with a heartfelt message: “We are entering a lifestyle where we are going to have to put ourselves second most of the time, and it is going to get exhausting. Above my desk, there is a post-it note, written and underlined in Sharpie that simply says, ‘It’s for the kids’ because the bottom line is that the kids are the reason why most of us are called to become teachers… Thinking about those kids and how we have the ability, the position, and the responsibility to help them with far more in real life than anything we can ever teach in front of a classroom—that’s what gets me out of bed in the morning, knowing that I am making a difference.”

In addition to his dedication to youth, McMahon had many passions including U-M sports, Star Wars, Marvel (especially Spiderman), video games, classic rock music, and movies. He made certain to be there for everyone in his life including his students.

He is survived by his parents, Corey and Kathleen McMahon; brother, Carter; and his grandparents, Richard McMahon and Barbara King. He was preceded in death by his grandparents, Linda McMahon and Rev. Clarence King.

Lawrence Singer Berlin passed away peacefully at home, surrounded by family on Sunday, June 25, 2023, in Ann Arbor. He was born December 23, 1928, in Kansas City, Missouri.

After serving two years in the Pacific with the U.S. Navy at the end of WWII, Larry attended the University of Missouri on the GI Bill, then earned his master’s in political science at the University of Michigan, where he spent his entire career. In 1959 he joined the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations.

In 1962 he became Director of Course Programs for the Extension Service.

From there he held a series of administrative and faculty positions at the university, many of them at the School of Education, where his research and teaching centered on adult and continuing education.

Larry believed deeply in the values and promise of democracy. The writings of John Dewey, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman figured large in his thinking. In retirement, Larry delighted in teaching through the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, offering courses in political theory and poetry.

In 1999, Larry and Jean McPhail, his second wife, moved to Christchurch, New Zealand, where Jean took a faculty position at the University of Canterbury. They enjoyed eight years of Kiwi adventures amid the diverse and breathtaking beauty of the landscape. Larry and Jean became citizens of New Zealand, wholeheartedly adopting the country as their second home.

Reading and writing poetry, gardening, and walking in the natural world were favorite pastimes for Larry. He watched birds and baseball with equal passion and relished fine wine and potato chips. His love of opera took him around the world and even onstage as a supernumerary actor in a New York Metropolitan Opera production of Aida in Detroit. Larry was remarkable for having a wide circle of friends throughout his life, all of whom he cherished.

In addition to his wife Jean, Larry is survived by his daughters Laurie, Melissa, and Netta; stepsons Ace (Diana) and Jordan (Theresa); grandchildren Rachel (Justin), Liam, Dash, Yara, and Elio; and the many members of his extended family. He was predeceased by his first wife Carole, daughter Jessica, and sister Rae Ann.

M ic h i g a n

E d u ca t i o n

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IN MEMORY

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 Santa J. Ono (ex officio)

NON-PROFIT ORG U S POSTAGE

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PA I D

ANN ARBOR, MI PERMIT NO. 144

The University of Michigan, as an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer, complies with all applicable federal and state laws regarding nondiscrimination and affirmative action. The University of Michigan is committed to a policy of equal opportunity for all persons and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, age, marital status, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, disability, religion, height, weight, or veteran status in employment, educational programs and activities, and admissions. Inquiries or complaints may be addressed to the Senior Director for Institutional Equity, and Title IX/ Section 504/ADA Coordinator, Office of Institutional Equity, 2072 Administrative Services Building, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-1432, 734-763-0235, TTY 734-647-1388. For other University of Michigan information call 734-764-1817.

Launching December 2023

Transforming Education in an Interconnected World A new open access, online learning series from the EdHub for Community and Professional Learning in the Marsal Family School of Education.

In this three-part series, join a global community of change agents committed to advancing educational access, quality, and equity in their local contexts.

Learn More:

Free to all University of Michigan alumni Available on Coursera