GROWING AN INCLUSIVE FUTURE Alumna Dawn Demps focuses on better learning outcomes at the University of Arizona

GROWING

an Inclusive Future

As a junior at Flint Central High School, Dawn Demps (Africana Studies and Social Sciences ’08) would often skip class to visit the public library across the street, enriching herself with learning that she was missing from her high school experience. Demps would spend hours reading, her mind flowing from poetry to history, stacked books charting her sincere pursuit of knowledge.

Ditching class for the library certainly isn’t an expected mode of teenage rebellion, but the unique factors of Demps’s truancy were met with indifference from school administrators. There was no intervention to help get her back on track. The absences began stacking up. A long history of academic achievement was soon pushed to the wayside. After all, Demps had researched college and arrived at the “slow, depressing realization” that her family could never afford to send her to college.

Demps felt like she was being actively excluded from a meaningful, transformative education. She dropped out of high school when she was 16 years old.

It was only after becoming a mother—and discovering the University of Michigan-Flint—that Demps uncovered the true possibilities of an inclusive and vibrant learning

community. After graduating from UM-Flint with a double major in Africana Studies and Social Sciences in 2008, Demps would go on to earn an M.A. in Social Justice from Marygrove College and a Ph.D. in Education Policy and Evaluation from Arizona State University. Finding the right environment challenged Demps to expect more from herself and from her education.

“When I got to college, I flourished because I could choose classes in so many interesting subjects, and I could go to events and listen to people share really deep thoughts and complex ideas. I could just listen and breathe it all in,” Demps says. “That was not the experience I had in high school at all. It did not allow for that type of exploration.”

Now a mother of three and an assistant professor in the College of Education at the University of Arizona, Demps is committed to creating better learning outcomes than she encountered as a young student. Informed by her own experiences, Demps investigates the exclusion of marginalized groups from education. Focusing not just on students, she also explores how teachers, board members, and parents (in particular, mothers) from marginalized populations are pushed to the fringes of the educational process.

For example, the implementation of “zero-tolerance policies” creates criminal cases that could be handled within the school system, or otherwise push out promising students with expulsions for minor infractions. These policies impact Black and Latinx students at a disproportionate rate and are closely associated with inadequate funding. Demps uses her research to work alongside the community, offering them tools to actively resist exclusion and interrupt the school-to-prison pipeline that is an unnecessary reality for marginalized groups.

This highly engaged work is a natural fit for Demps, who was advocating for her community in Flint long before she saw a future as a college professor.

Flint Foundations

Demps wrote her first grant proposal shortly after dropping out of high school, a successful pitch to the Catholic Diocese of Lansing (which serves Flint) to educate pregnant women about the health of their babies. Then 17 years old, Demps brought together underserved expectant mothers during the holidays, reaching out through organizations such as local homeless and domestic abuse shelters. In addition to offering the mothers resources like diapers and healthy food, healthcare practitioners shared information about child brain development and parenting skills. Demps describes the exhilaration she felt in making a difference.

“Seeing it come to fruition, how I was able to coordinate different components of a project, it showed me what was possible when you bring the community together to accomplish something,” Demps says. “I knew this was the life for me. This is the sort of work I should be doing.”

The concept of motherhood was of central importance during Demps’s formative years. Demps cites her own mother, Patricia Demps, as a key influence, exemplifying the values that would later inform her scholarly work. “If a neighborhood kid needed somewhere to stay, they had a place to stay at our house,” Demps explains. She would later understand her mom’s efforts as “motherwork,” a term coined by scholar Patricia Hill Collins to describe the ways mothers from marginalized populations advocate for their children in a historically disenfranchising society. Demps’s Ph.D. dissertation focuses on an organization of Arizona mothers working to transform a system that fails to provide equitable access to educational spaces for Black children.

“I am who I am because of Flint, because I saw this motherwork in action around the city. It serves as an example of what it really means to believe that children are our future.”

Dawn Demps (UM-Flint ’08) is an assistant professor in the College of Education at the University of Arizona.

Finding Support at UM-Flint

Working full time, being a mother, and writing community grants kept Demps busy, but she knew education was the best pathway to stability for her family. She first connected with UM-Flint while attending community college, but again brushed away the possibility of attending a university. She was a high school dropout and being a university student was simply out of reach.

UM-Flint’s Office of Educational Opportunity Initiatives (EOI) changed that mindset. Demps knew one of the EOI staff members through her community work and saw him speaking at her community college. He convinced Demps to fill out an application, waving the fee and explaining the aid that would be available to her. A few weeks later, she received her acceptance letter in the mail, news she describes as “way beyond my wildest dreams.”

As a UM-Flint student, Demps found the meaningful intellectual life that had evaded her for years. She took advantage of all the campus had to offer while balancing work and parenting. She jokes that her kids know UM-Flint just as well as she does, as they would often accompany her to campus. Sometimes the EOI staff would help watch the kids while Demps was in class, other times a professor would accommodate Demps bringing her children in the classroom. Demps stresses that none of it would have been possible without a great deal of support, both from her family and the connections she found on campus.

“People ask me all the time how I did it,” Demps says. “I had to be really creative and I had a lot of support. It’s too much to do alone.”

A key piece of support came from Rudy Hernandez, then an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology. He saw the passion and experience Demps brought to class and pushed her to apply for Ph.D. programs, a notion that seemed as outlandish to Demps as earning a bachelor’s degree was just a few years prior. As it turns out, it was good advice.

Family time with the loves of her life.

I am who I am because of Flint, because I saw this motherwork in action around the city. It serves as an example of what it really means to believe that children are our future.

Left to Right: Dawn, Jayanti, Zora,

Creating an Inclusive Future

Demps has consistently put community needs at the forefront of her professional and academic life. After earning a Ph.D. in Education Policy and Evaluation from Arizona State University in 2021, Demps joined the Department of Educational Policy Studies and Practice in the College of Education at the University of Arizona as an assistant professor. She continues to regard community stakeholders as a vital partner in her work now as an educator and scholar.

“Universities are often extractive; they pull information, they publish articles. What does that give back to the people who gave you all the information?” Demps asks. She pushes for community members to be given credit for their contributions to university life, such as by making them co-authors on scholarly publications.

This commitment to university-community connections can be traced back to Demps’s time as an undergraduate student. Despite her many commitments, Demps founded the Shariki Group, an organization that bridged the gap between area kids and UM-Flint. Shariki would organize events that brought K-12 students to campus, offering a place to have fun while learning more about college. Demps recalls an overnight event she helped to organize; basketball in the Recreation Center was followed by talks about college planning and financial aid.

Demps was ahead of her time. The integration of community stakeholders in academic life is becoming increasingly emphasized at institutions across the country, including UM-Flint and the University of Arizona.

“The literature shows that [universities] are making more intentional inroads to break down those barriers and to stop that hierarchy between academia and community, but it’s going to be continued work—you’re never done.”

Demps has overcome self-doubt and professional challenges thanks to her unending passion for uplifting children through educational access. The exact trajectory she would take was not always clear—Demps wasn’t sure she would pursue a professorship when beginning her graduate studies—but the goal of improving outcomes for marginalized kids was never in doubt. When speaking at a UM-Flint alumni event in 2016, she highlighted the importance of combining passion with intentionality, stating that “passion without any sort of a plan is chaos.”

As a first-generation college student, Demps encountered many unknowns on her way to becoming a professor. She recognizes this experience as ubiquitous—any worthwhile pursuit, in education or otherwise, will be filled with uncertainty. The solution? Don’t be afraid to ask for help.

“I’m not scared to talk to anyone, and I have never been afraid to ask lots of questions. I think that has let people know I really was interested and invested, and so they, in turn, invested in me,” Demps says. “I’m born and raised in Flint. We’ve got a lot of pride. We think we can do it on our own, but realistically ... you have to put pride aside and ask for help. And there’s nothing wrong with that.”

Article by Logan McGrady – (Business Administration ’13) is UM-Flint’s marketing & digital communication manager. Images courtesy of Cynthia Sodari – College of Education, University of Arizona.