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Class of Fall 2024: CEHHS graduate Jesse Whitman

lblouin — Mon, 09 Dec 2024 15:48:18 +0000

Class of Fall 2024: CEHHS graduate Jesse Whitman lblouin Mon, 12/09/2024 - 10:48

Education master’s student and Fall ’24 graduate Jesse Whitman has always been drawn to people and places that don’t match his own background. In fact, when he graduated from his small-town, southwest Michigan high school in 2007, he didn’t apply to a single in-state university — just to guarantee that he’d land somewhere unfamiliar. As it turned out, Miami University in Oxford, Ohio wasn’t exactly exotic, but it was hard to turn down a Division I track scholarship. Whitman’s major at Miami, however, did stretch his horizons. He majored in history, with a concentration in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies. He even learned Arabic. “I just have always had this desire to learn about other cultures, and that seemed about as different from my own background as you could get,” he says.

Whitman loved his time at Miami, but he jokes now that his choice of major may have complicated his employment prospects — especially given he graduated in 2011, when the U.S. economy was still recovering from the Great Recession. So fresh out of college, and struggling to find work in his field, he decided to completely switch gears. He says he joined the Navy in small part because his grandfather had served in the Navy, and in large part because he had a lot of student loan debt and the Navy has a generous loan repayment program. When he enlisted, he scored high on the ASVAB exam, a sort of SAT for the military, which put him on track to train to become a “nuke” — technical staff who maintain the electrical systems on the Navy’s nuclear-powered submarines and aircraft carriers. The intense training lasted 18 months, after which Whitman was assigned to the Harry S. Truman, an aircraft carrier based in Norfolk, Virginia, where he worked on operations and maintenance of the nuclear propulsion plant’s high-voltage electrical system.

Whitman says his time in the Navy shaped him in several important ways. The high-stakes environment of operating a nuclear-powered electrical system taught him a lot about the importance of owning your work. And it enabled him to see the world: during his time in the Navy, he went to Dubai, Croatia, Crete and Bahrain. Most importantly, he says, it taught him a lot about people — and specifically, about who Americans really are, deep down, when the issues that divide us aren’t front and center. “I mean, when you’re doing your shift and you’re trying to stay awake at 2 a.m. and you're not looking at your equipment, what are you doing? You’re learning about the person sitting next to you, what they believe in, what they enjoyed about the recent port call,” he says. “The Navy takes a really big sample of America. It’s maybe a better representation of what America really is — or could be. It’s the melting pot. It’s people who have really different backgrounds and beliefs, but there is this expectation that we’re all going to work together regardless of our beliefs because we all have this greater mission we’re contributing to. After being in the Navy, I’m confident I could work with anyone.”

Whitman says the reason he left the Navy was pretty simple: His daughter was born, and his demanding work schedule, which required him to be out to sea for weeks at a time, meant he was missing too many of her “firsts.” He decided not to renew his contract and to head back to school, making what seemed like a logical choice. He enrolled in ��-Dearborn’s electrical engineering program, where he says the stunning new Engineering Lab Building was a big draw. But three semesters in, he simply wasn’t feeling it. “I was doing well academically, but it wasn’t ‘sparking joy’ — to quote Marie Kondo,” he says, smiling. “So I tried to think back to the last time I felt a lot of job satisfaction, and it was teaching.”

In the Navy, it turned out, Whitman got to do quite a bit of teaching, most often about technical subjects having to do with the ship’s electrical systems. Other times, it was more informal, like the mentorship that came with looking out for younger members of his team. “Some of them were 18 years old, and the Navy can throw a lot of money at you, so it’s important to take care of your finances,” he says. “They had questions about how to buy a car or buy a house, and I was a little older, so I could help them with that stuff. It felt good to be able to impact their lives in a really practical way.” Whitman decided to cut his losses in his engineering program and switch to a Master’s of Education. The vibe shift for him was immediate. He says it felt incredible to suddenly be around a group of super positive people who were all committed to serving a greater good — not totally unlike the environment he’d found in the Navy, but it was a better fit for who he’d become.

Whitman says it feels pretty amazing to be bringing this chapter of his life to a close — which, of course, is really just the beginning of a new chapter. In particular, he feels fortunate to have had the time and space to “find my footing as a 35-year-old man,” something he says was only an option because of his wife’s support. And his student teaching experience this past semester has only reinforced the feeling that he’s made a good choice. In particular, he’s enjoyed all the experimentation it's forced him to do. On his very first day, for example, when he bored the first two periods of sixth-grade geography students with a prepared lecture on the fundamentals of maps, he wasted no time pivoting. During the lunch hour, he quizzed his supervising teacher, who gave him some sage advice about the attention spans of 11-year-olds that he’s still using. Developmentally, Whitman says, kids that age are still learning how to digest large “blocks” of information. So this semester, he learned to mix in things like YouTube videos and activities that ask the kids to weigh in with their takes on things. “Luckily, I’m at the age where it’s easy for me to accept that I don’t know everything,” Whitman says. “I’m new to this, so working with teachers that have been at this for 20 years — of course, they’re going to be better at it than me. Why wouldn’t I try out their advice? Even they’re still trying out new things. You see that teaching really is going to be a lifelong learning experience.”

In fact, Whitman’s student teaching experience at his Oak Park middle school has been so enjoyable, he’s now thinking his preferred first job might be something like teaching 7th grade — even though he originally envisioned himself as a high school social studies teacher. “With all things, I try to just embrace the opportunity you find yourself with,” he says. “I kind of think of it like being in a maze. How do you know you’re going the wrong direction? You hit the wall and turn around. That’s happened to me a few times in life. But now I’m finding that I might want to do middle school because I gave it a chance. The path in front of me still feels open.”

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Story by Lou Blouin

Commencement

Off

Mon, 12/09/2024 - 15:44

After serving in the Navy for eight years, Jesse Whitman is answering a different call and pursuing a career in teaching.

For the final leg of his master's in education, December grad Jesse Whitman has been teaching middle school geography at a school in Oak Park. Photo by Annie Barker

Lecturer Rashid Faisal wants you to remember — and see yourself in — Cornelius Henderson

lblouin — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 14:19:21 +0000

Lecturer Rashid Faisal wants you to remember — and see yourself in — Cornelius Henderson lblouin Mon, 11/18/2024 - 09:19

Two years ago, the University of Michigan announced the launch of the Inclusive History Project, an initiative aimed at studying and documenting the history of the university that’s attentive to diversity, equity and inclusion. But ��-Dearborn Education Lecturer and ’20 EdD alum Rashid Faisal has been chasing down the life story of a 1911 African American U-M engineering grad for a lot longer than that. When Faisal first learned of Cornelius Henderson in 2006 during a conversation with one of his wife’s colleagues, Faisal was surprised he’d never heard of Henderson before, given that African American history is a subject he studies pretty intensely. According to the one-pager he was handed, Henderson was an engineer who was pivotal in two of the most groundbreaking early civil engineering projects in Detroit, the Ambassador Bridge and the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel. The other detail that immediately caught Faisal’s attention: Henderson attended one of Faisal’s alma maters — the University of Michigan — at a time when it had very few non-white students. “We knew very little about the Black students at the university who attended well before what we would consider the affirmative action era of the 1960s,” Faisal explains. “I mean, we’re talking about 1906 when Henderson started as a student. What was his life like? What was his experience like? It just opened up this window for me to try to learn more about the early African American students at the university.”

When Faisal began that research, he learned of people like George Jewett, who, in the 1890s, became the first African American varsity football player at U-M. And there was Eddie Tolan, a world-record-setting Olympic sprinter who ran track at the university in the 1930s. But Faisal was continually drawn in by the details of Henderson’s story. The rough existing sketch of Henderson’s life that existed at the time was that he was the only African American student in the engineering college and was a standout student despite being isolated by his white classmates. When Henderson graduated and began looking for work, he was denied by every engineering firm in Detroit — except one, which offered him a janitorial position. Fortunately, a chance encounter with one of his U-M classmates led to a better opportunity: The young man urged Henderson to apply for work at his employer, the Canadian Bridge Company in Windsor. Henderson took the advice and ended up building a career there that spanned 47 years, climbing the company ladder from entry-level draftsman to structural design engineer by the time of the Ambassador Bridge and Detroit-Windsor Tunnel projects.

Education Lecturer Rashid Faisal has been chasing down the story of Cornelius Henderson for nearly two decades. Photo by Annie Barker

That general story alone made Henderson an interesting figure, but Faisal was hungry for more of the textural details of his life. And as he did more research, he often encountered things that complicated the traditional narrative. First and foremost, the young Henderson, the University of Michigan student, was often assumed to be a person who endured isolation as the college’s lone Black student. Faisal says one of his professors even described being particularly impressed by Henderson’s achievements in mathematics and science because he, unlike his white classmates, did his work “without help.” But Faisal says other details of Henderson’s life give us reason to question this assumption. Henderson, Faisal says, would have been part of what W.E.B. Dubois often called the “Talented Tenth” — a term for an influential class of early 20th-century African American leaders who were highly educated and dedicated to bettering circumstances for Black Americans. Henderson’s father was a college president and considered one of the most highly educated men of his era. His mother was a teacher. His older brother also attended U-M, went to medical school at the Detroit College of Medicine and became a prominent Detroit doctor. And though he was likely the only Black student in the college of engineering, he shared a rich social life with other Black students who were members of the Epsilon Chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, the oldest Black fraternity at U-M. His fraternity brothers included people like Richard Hill, a U-M law student who later mentored Thurgood Marshall. “Henderson came from a certain kind of Black American cultural capital: the Black church, the Black fraternity system and historically Black colleges and universities,” Faisal says. “So, from an outsider's point of view, it may have appeared he was doing this all on his own. But just because the culture of support was rendered invisible doesn’t mean the culture didn’t exist. In many ways, he was part of the elite of American society at that time.”

Aside from the Ambassador Bridge and Detroit-Windsor Tunnel, Henderson contributed to a wide variety of projects, including serving as architect and engineer for Memorial Park Cemetery, the first Black cemetery in Detroit. Faisal has uncovered evidence that indicates Henderson was also involved in the construction of multiple apartment buildings and hospitals in the city. Photo courtesy of Rashid Faisal

Faisal thinks recognizing that Henderson’s achievement didn’t happen in a vacuum is important for a number of reasons. First, he says casting Henderson as exceptional, or doing what he did “without help,” feeds the so-called “magical Negro” narrative, a racist trope from the era that framed Black intellectual achievement as unusual. Moreover, in erasing the context for Henderson’s admittedly remarkable life and rendering him only as a talented person who overcame obstacles, we make his story less accessible and relatable to contemporary audiences. For example, it’s long been a priority for higher education institutions to increase representation of Black students in STEM disciplines. But Faisal says if we’re erasing or misrepresenting historical examples like Henderson, we’re failing to give today’s students the opportunity to see themselves not as trailblazers in a field where they've historically not “belonged,” but as part of a long story of achievement in which they are simply the latest chapter. “In the absence of historical memory, we ask students to understand what they’re doing as new when we have a blueprint from the past,” Faisal says.

Indeed, over his many years as an educator of both K-12 and college students, Faisal has leveraged Henderson’s story to challenge students’ views of themselves, others and history. He’s used Henderson’s life as a leaping off point for students to do oral histories of their own families, a project that’s led many students to discover unknown family legacies of college attendance, including some first-generation college students who realized they actually aren’t the first. In 2016, Faisal led a team of fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders, who did their own research on Henderson and created a traveling exhibition, which they presented throughout southeast Michigan, including to a class of ��-Dearborn graduate students, and which was on display at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History for an entire year. Most recently, with support from an Inclusive History Project grant, Faisal asked ��-Dearborn students in his multicultural education course to reckon with the “multiple identity” features of Henderson’s life, especially the sometimes conflicting forces of his race and social class. The results were fascinating. Faisal found it interesting, for example, how easily one Arab American engineering student was able to find herself in Henderson’s story, as she faced similar challenges as a woman in a predominantly male field. For one white male student, it was a revelation that a Black intellectual class even existed at that time. “I had one student who wondered if maybe the discrimination Henderson faced in looking for a job was based on his language,” Faisal recalls. “And I found this so interesting because her comments seemed to be based in certain assumptions of her understanding of the Black vernacular, when in reality, Henderson, because he came from an elite class, probably talked like the rest of the guys in those engineering firms. But I was glad she made that point. It shows that what we see today informs our understanding of the past, and that we often try to understand things that are unfamiliar to us in terms of what is familiar.” Faisal says the hope in doing an exercise like this is that students, when they’re out in the world working as educators, will approach issues of identity in a more nuanced way. “So when that student is out there teaching her unit on Black history, maybe she won’t just reach for Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass,” Faisal explains. “She’ll reach for the lesser-known figures. She’ll make the cross-cultural comparisons. And when you do that, the story becomes alive.”

Along with Howard Lindsay, Lurine Moncrease and Sharon Sexton, members of the Black Historical Sites Committee at the Detroit Historical Museum, Faisial helped create a new historical marker honoring Henderson in Detroit’s Riverside Park. Photo by Annie Barker

Henderson has now been part of Faisal’s life for nearly 20 years, and in some ways, he may be reaching the end of what he can do with the historical record. Unfortunately, many of the details of Henderson’s engineering achievements were likely lost in a fire that destroyed a significant portion of the Canadian Bridge Company’s historical records. But Faisal reckons he’s not quite done with Henderson. He’s thinking his next project might be a book series on Henderson’s life for children and young adults. And he’s hopeful that the next round of Inclusive History Project funding will enable him to create a walking tour of sites connected to the history of U-M’s early Black students, which would include a new historical marker honoring Henderson in Detroit’s Riverside Park near the Ambassador Bridge. “From my perspective, everything U-M is doing with the Inclusive History Project, it’s all positives and no negatives,” Faisal says. “I could see this as a project across all major universities with long histories — and I hope they follow our lead.”

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Story by Lou Blouin

Faculty and Staff

Inclusion or Diversity

University History

Off

Mon, 11/18/2024 - 14:17

With an Inclusive History Project grant, the education lecturer is challenging his students to reckon with the nearly forgotten life story of a 1911 African American U-M grad who became an accomplished Detroit civil engineer.

Cornelius Henderson attended U-M at a time when it had very few Black students and went on to contribute to two of the most ambitious early civil engineering projects in Detroit: the Ambassador Bridge and Detroit-Windsor Tunnel. Photo by Annie Barker

Class of Spring 2024: CEHHS graduate Weirong Huang

lblouin — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 12:25:23 +0000

Class of Spring 2024: CEHHS graduate Weirong Huang lblouin Mon, 04/29/2024 - 08:25

Being a kindergarten teacher who specializes in working with English language learners was never Weirong Huang’s plan. In fact, when Huang was offered her first permanent teaching position working in a Dearborn Public Schools’ classroom with ELL students shortly after her 2020 graduation from ��-Dearborn, she almost turned the job down. As someone who just a few years earlier was learning English herself, she doubted whether she was the best person to help students. Moreover, while she spoke English, Cantonese, Mandarin and several other Chinese dialects, she didn't know any Arabic, which many of her potential students spoke as their first and only language. But Huang ended up taking the job, and three years later, she has no regrets. In fact, helping children learn English has become such a defining part of her life as a teacher, she decided to return to ��-Dearborn for her M.A. in Education with the English as a Second Language (ESL) endorsement, a degree she officially claimed at Saturday’s commencement ceremony.

Huang, who grew up in southern China, initially came to the United States on a two-year visa working as an au pair for a family in the Dearborn area. But she says she also saw it as an opportunity to continue her education. It’d been a dream of hers to open a preschool in China, but she wanted to study in the U.S., where she says the educational philosophies were less strict and focused more on children's individual interests. After her au pair job ended, she enrolled at Oakland Community College and later transferred into the education program at ��-Dearborn. At the university, she says she found exactly what she was looking for — namely, a program that exposed her to a range of creative educational approaches. In particular, she remembers being shocked — in a good way — the first time she visited ��-Dearborn’s Early Childhood Education Center. The school follows what is known as the Reggio Emilia model, where young children are encouraged to explore the world around them — continuously constructing and revising their individual theories about how the world works, like little scientists. It was basically the antithesis of the “factory” model of education. If she ever did get to start a preschool, Huang thought she’d want it to be just like that.

In her classroom at Snow Elementary in Dearborn, Huang says she likes looking for opportunities to use constructivist techniques with her kindergartners. But day to day, language is always front of mind. In a typical school year, Huang has about 20 5- and 6-year-olds, about half of whom start the year knowing little or no English. Moreover, nearly all of her ELL students are Arabic speaking, so she’s learned a variety of techniques for overcoming the language barrier. In Dearborn Public Schools, English learners aren’t grouped into special ELL classrooms — they attend classes with their English-speaking peers. Huang says this approach has a variety of advantages. One of the biggest is it lets her pair ELL students and bilingual students. Kids being naturally helpful, it’s never hard to get volunteers to translate, though she says this buddy system can definitely lead to a chatty classroom. Another technique: Using more language-neutral tools to jumpstart language learning. “For example, when we do our daily writing assignments, we do a drawing first. Then we write about what we’re drawing,” Huang explains. This gives students a low-pressure task that lays the foundation for their language activities, which helps build their confidence.

Huang says one of the biggest lessons she’s learned both through her program and in her three years leading a classroom is that assessment has to be treated as a nearly continuous activity for English learners. “Maybe you have a student who you just think is quiet, but that’s when you have to make sure that maybe he’s not just quiet, he’s struggling with the language,” she says. “So you have to have little conversations with them all the time, to see where they’re at. My students tease me because even at recess I’m assessing them. I’ll call them in and ask them to count to 100 and then send them back to play.” Little “tests” like this allow a teacher to see if a student is struggling with something. If they are, Huang knows to give them a little extra time — until she sees that unmistakable spark of understanding in their eyes. “You have to always be watching,” she says. “As a teacher, you have so many eyes.”

Initially, Huang thought her own status as an English language learner would be a liability in the classroom. “I honestly feared that if parents knew that about me maybe they wouldn’t want me teaching their kids,” she says. Now, she doesn’t worry about it. If anything, she sees her own ELL status as an asset that helps her relate to her students. She knows what it feels like to come to a new country and be so scared to speak that you just stay quiet. She also knows how good it feels to work hard and overcome that fear. She’s open with her students about her own story, which she says helps build a bridge between them, no matter what language they speak. “I think they are amazed that I’m from China because they think all teachers live at the school,” she says, laughing. “They don't think you have a personal life. Or that you have kids their age, or have a guinea pig and two tortoises, or like to draw. So I like to share a lot with them. So much of education at this age is just about inspiring them and building their confidence and setting them up to become lifelong learners. So whatever common ground we can find and have fun with, you have to use it.”

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Story by Lou Blouin

Commencement

Inclusion or Diversity

Off

Mon, 04/29/2024 - 12:14

The ’20 education alum returned for a master’s to pursue her passion for teaching English language learners.

Graphic by Violet Dashi

If you want kids to learn music, teach it like a language

lblouin — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 12:59:01 +0000

If you want kids to learn music, teach it like a language lblouin Mon, 03/04/2024 - 07:59

The adorably awkward end-of-year music concert featuring kiddos singing their hearts out is a cherished school tradition that Eric Bottorff says he can live without. The Livonia Public Schools elementary music teacher has his reasons for doing away with the “cute concert” genre at his school. For starters, he never wants to set anyone up for disappointment, and the reality is that many of his students have life circumstances that will keep them or their loved ones from attending an after-school event. Prepping a performance is also a huge time suck. The conventional wisdom among music educators, which Bottorff figures is about right, is that every minute of a concert costs a music teacher an hour of instruction. Plus, it’s clear to him that teaching kids to sing a prescribed set of songs, mostly to ensure a cute photo op for their parents, is not the same thing as teaching kids music anyway. Above all, he wants children to leave his classroom feeling like music is “something everyone can do.”

Bottorff’s willingness to experiment with new ways of teaching kids music is earning him recognition and an increasingly large platform for sharing his ideas. He’s a regular presenter at educational conferences, and now gets so many requests for his lesson plans, he’s turned that into a little side business. Here at ��-Dearborn, in addition to being a student in the Department of Education’s doctoral program, he teaches a course on how to incorporate the arts into all kinds of classroom subjects, a key part of which is getting teachers-in-training to see themselves as musical people. Earlier this year, Bottorff received one of his highest-profile accolades: He was named the Michigan Music Educator of the Year by the Michigan Music Education Association, in part for creating a new research-based curriculum for his district that’s more inclusive of the needs of special education students.

Central to Bottorff’s approach is a belief that traditional ways of teaching kids music leave something to be desired. On one end of the spectrum, having children sing songs in unison doesn’t do much to teach them what music actually is. Interestingly, Bottorff says the opposite approach — introducing students to formal musical notation and instrument instruction at a very early age — can leave kids with the same deficits. Instead, Bottorff says we should think about learning music like we do learning a language, an idea that’s supported by research suggesting the brain processes language and music in a similar way. “Very often, in music teaching, we try to jump straight to reading music, as if the note on the page is the only true version of the song,” Bottorff explains. “But realistically, when we learn to read English, or any other language, we’ve had three or four years of hearing people speak it and us speaking it back. But we try to skip all those steps when we try to teach kids music.”

This is why in Bottorff’s classroom, students won’t see musical notation until the end of the second grade. By that time, they’ve had nearly three years to experience music in more developmentally appropriate ways. For example, in kindergarten, Bottorff introduces the students to a diverse range of musical styles, so they can begin to internalize different genres, rhythms and time signatures, using mostly their ears and voices. By first and second grade, they’re starting to learn a bit of vocabulary for reading and writing music. But like a baby learning to babble, they use a language of music that makes sense to them. Quarter notes and eighth notes, for example, are “doos” and “doo-days.” Rhythms and time signatures are learned by clapping hands or stomping feet. Bottorff says this makes the leap to learning musical notation, or an instrument like the recorder or ukulele, a pretty straightforward process by third or fourth grade, since the students already have a working knowledge of what music actually consists of. “I tell my kids my goal is not that you’re a good ukulele player. My goal is when you’re 30 years old, and you need a hobby because you’re tired from working or need a break from your family, you don’t need to call me to learn how to play guitar,” he says. “You can remember some of these skills and figure it out on your own. And feel confident enough to try.”

Bottorff has also revamped how special education students experience music in his classroom. For a variety of reasons, he says music class has traditionally been a “tough time” for many special education students — and the paraprofessionals who aid them throughout their days. When he started teaching special education music classes, he noticed that when students were struggling with a task, their parapros often couldn’t resist the temptation to intervene, either by singing for the student or even taking their hands and clapping for them. So Bottorff collaborated with the aides to come up with some new approaches, based both on his expertise and the parapros’ experience of what worked well for the kids in other settings. “For example, we actually made a poster that hangs in the classroom — the ‘Rules for Adults in the Music Room’ — which I have to hold myself to as well,” he says. “Don’t sing for a kid, let them sing on their own. Let the kids find their own beat. Give them time to process. I mean, we decided that we’re willing to wait 30 seconds for a response, because we want the student to find their way to an outcome that makes sense for them.” Ultimately, his philosophy, which he borrowed from his mother, a retired special education teacher, is to “make sure the kids are happy to show up, sad to leave and are learning something in the middle.” The fact that many of his special education students say music class is their favorite part of the day is an indication that something is working.

Given the impact Bottorff’s had on music education in his district, it may surprise you to learn that he doesn’t see himself in the music field forever. People have been telling him for a while that he’d make a good principal, and he sees how an administrative role would give him a broader platform for creating a supportive educational culture that goes beyond the music room. In fact, his dissertation work at ��-Dearborn isn’t focused on music — a subject he says is so specific it tends to “pigeonhole you as an educator.” Instead, Bottorff is studying various aspects of “advisory,” an educational approach that’s experiencing a bit of a revival. Advisory takes a huge range of forms, but the core idea is that fostering a quasi-parental role for teachers can aid students' social-emotional development. He got a crash course in a fairly intensive form of advisory while he was a young teacher in South Korea. He was assigned 10 sixth graders, for whom he “was their person.” He would meet weekly with the kids, often at the school’s on-campus coffee shop, where they’d do things like play games and talk about their lives. He was also their official advocate if they had a behavior issue that required intervention from the school. Bottorff said he saw some huge benefits to this approach. But he also felt totally unprepared for having that kind of relationship with a student. “I think we have teachers who already feel stretched in their responsibilities. Or teachers who feel like they don't know how to make connections with these kids outside of, say, teaching them chemistry,” he says. Bottorff’s dissertation is focusing on several schools who are using advisory, so he can study what kind of support teachers need to make this approach work.

Those are the kinds of larger reforms he could help foster as a principal, which is one of the main reasons he’s willing to leave a role he loves. He figures he can always teach trombone lessons on the side if he needs his music kick. Plus, it’s hard to imagine someone who’s spent 14 years as a music teacher totally giving it up. A principal who loves to sing and plays tuba, ukulele, trumpet and about two dozen other instruments would likely be someone students never forget.

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Story by Lou Blouin

Faculty and Staff

Graduate Research

Inclusion or Diversity

Off

Mon, 03/04/2024 - 12:50

Education doctoral student and elementary music teacher Eric Bottorff recently won the Michigan Music Educator of the Year award for his inventive classroom approaches, including teaching music to special education students.

Graphic by Violet Dashi. Images by Ruslan Grumble, kues1 and Prot via Adobe Stock

K-12 teachers need to understand AI. So do those who train them.

lblouin — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 13:42:01 +0000

K-12 teachers need to understand AI. So do those who train them. lblouin Wed, 01/24/2024 - 08:42

Recently, College of Education, Health and Human Services Associate Dean Stein Brunvand was in a virtual meeting when his colleague, Assistant Professor of ESL Education Kyongson Park, asked the group for input on a rubric for her class. She had the categories nailed down, but still needed to come up with specific criteria for what would be deemed "exceptional" versus "approaching standards" versus "below standards."

Multitasking as folks do from time to time on Zoom, Brunvand opened up ChatGPT and instructed: “‘I need you to be a professor of an undergraduate course in English as a second language methods and I need a rubric for a lesson plan.’ And I specified what the lesson plan had to have and the categories and said ‘I need criteria for a four-point rubric.’”

Before the meeting ended — in less than five minutes, actually — Brunvand was able to send Park the results. Not being a subject matter expert, he couldn’t ensure they were helpful. But overcoming the blank page is often the biggest hurdle, and he figured the info might provide a useful starting point. Park agreed.

When ChatGPT debuted just over a year ago, it ignited fears across K-12 and higher ed about the potential of generative AI to propel cheating on exams and essays into hyper-drive. But many educators — both nationwide and here on the ��-Dearborn campus — are focusing on its potential to enhance both learning and instruction, even as they remain highly cognizant of its limits and the ways it can be misused.

Brunvand and his colleagues in the Department of Education have a somewhat different relationship to generative AI than other faculty: not only do they have to think about the implications of the technology for their own students, they have to prepare those students to use it thoughtfully in other educational settings, including the K-12 classrooms where many of them will eventually teach. And, of course, they have to do so while continually learning about this quick-evolving technology themselves.

To know more about what he doesn’t know, as Brunvand puts it, he applied for the International Society for Technology in Education’s first-ever ”AI Exploration for Educator Preparation Programs” fellowship. Brunvand was selected for the eight-month program, which began in March 2023, along with six other educators from across the country. The fellows attended workshops with leaders in the field, learned about new resources and research, and collaborated on a presentation, “Critical Strategies That Prepare Teachers to Teach With and About Artificial Intelligence,” which they delivered at ISTE’s annual conference in Philadelphia. Building on that presentation, they offered a two-hour online workshop for educators nationwide in November. It was so successful, they are offering a second workshop — expanded to three hours — on Feb. 29.

Brunvand will also be sharing what he’s learned directly with the ��-Dearborn — and broader U-M — community. In addition to developing a workshop or other learning opportunity for colleagues across campus, he’s a part of two proposed presentations — one with Professor of Reading and Language Arts Danielle DeFauw and one with ��-Dearborn’s generative AI task force, of which he’s a member — at a “Generative AI in Education” conference being held at ��-Flint in March. And he’s working with Professor of Technology Mesut Duran to incorporate the best practices he’s studied into revamped Educational Technology undergraduate and graduate programs.

Brunvand shared some of the key takeaways from his fellowship experience with Reporter.

It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it

The more specific the prompts given generative AI, the better the chances that the content will prove useful. Brunvand’s query on behalf of his colleague is a good example: it provides a context, assigns a specific role, creates a task and defines a format. It’s important to remember that a query will not usually be a one-shot exercise. If the output is promising but doesn’t quite suit an educator’s needs, revise the prompts and try again. Aspiring teachers can learn how to do this on the job by doing it during their time at ��-Dearborn, Brunvand says.

"We can be up front with students and say, 'I actually want you to use ChatGPT and I want you to use this right,'" he says. "'Here's the assignment that I'm giving you. I want to see the prompts that you put in. I want to see how you revise those prompts to narrow down the content that you got and I also want to see how you interrogated that content. How did you do your fact checking? Is it accurate? Are there hallucinations in the responses that you got?' and go through that process, and so that students can start to see, 'Okay, not everything I get out of this is going to be perfect. I need to verify, just like I would verify if I'm doing a search in Google.'"

Be aware of bias

The universe of information that generative AI draws from — essentially everything that is accessible on the internet — is vast. But it is also inherently biased. Educators need to critically assess the answers they receive and ask themselves who or what may be left out. “An example that someone gave was they did a search for the top children's authors, and they noticed that the first five names that came up were all white men,” Brunvand recalls. "They thought, 'Is that really true?' I mean, if I were to ask humans, if I were to approach this a different way, would I still come up with just a bunch of white guys as the top children's authors?"

Know students’ needs

One of the most fundamental skills taught in the education program is how to create a lesson plan. Although new teachers will be expected to use a highly structured curriculum, no matter what district they work in, there will likely still be room to customize. At that point, generative AI can be a big help.

"Creating a lesson plan from scratch might not be necessary, but we want our graduates to be able to use something like ChatGPT or other similar type of generative tool to say, 'I'm a third grade teacher, and I'm teaching about the water cycle. And I need some examples for how to teach this to students for whom English is not their first language, or I need some ideas for how to differentiate my instruction, because I've got students at different learning abilities, or I need some more ideas for hands on activities,'" Brunvand explains. “And it's not to say that you're going to get wonderful ideas spit back out at you, but as a teacher. if you've got an understanding of your students and know what their needs are, you can turn to some of these tools and say, ‘Okay, help me out.’”

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Article by Kristin Palm

Technology

Off

Wed, 01/24/2024 - 13:41

CEHHS Associate Dean Stein Brunvand was part of an inaugural fellowship program to help education faculty integrate this evolving technology into their curricula.

Graphic by Violet Dashi. Images by Drazen via Adobe Stock

Quan Neloms' school of hip hop

lblouin — Thu, 10 Aug 2023 15:02:42 +0000

Quan Neloms' school of hip hop lblouin Thu, 08/10/2023 - 11:02

Forty-two-year-old Quan Neloms counts himself lucky that his childhood overlapped the Golden Age of Hip Hop. Make a movie based on his teenage years growing up in Detroit in the ’90s— which by the way, he’s working on a screenplay for — and you’d see a lunchroom full of kids pounding out beats on tables and friends circling up in groups to rap or beatbox until the bell called them back to class. After school, the venue would switch to the Hip Hop Shop, a Detroit clothing store where Neloms and his friends came of age at Saturday open mics with J Dilla, Eminem and musicians from the D12 collective, before these artists were known to national audiences. One of his favorite, and embarrassing, memories from his childhood was the time Proof and Bizarre from D12 called out Neloms and his friends during a rap battle, at which they had just planned to be spectators, bobbing their heads while the “gladiators” did the work. The shy 15-year-olds melted at the invitation to freestyle. “We don’t know how to rap, man!” they pleaded. Which wasn’t true. Neloms had started writing rhymes and rapping when he was 14, and he was actually pretty good, especially at the writing part. When he was 17, Jason Wilson, the DJ from the Detroit rap group Kaos & Mystro, invited Neloms and his friends to record in their studio, which turned out to be something of a turning point in his life. Not because they ever got a big record contract. But because hearing that his voice actually sounded good gave a shy kid a newfound confidence that bled through to the rest of his life.

Neloms, a veteran Detroit educator who’s been a lecturer at ��-Dearborn since 2021, likes to joke that his early studio experience made him the first member of Lyricist Society, the after-school group he started in 2009 when he was a high school teacher at the Douglass Academy for Young Men in Detroit. On one level, the mission of the group is to do more or less what that producer from Kaos & Mystro did for him. Typically, the Lyricist Society process starts with the students discussing subjects, writing rhymes and laying down some foundational instrumentals, which they workshop as a group until they feel a track is ready to record. Then they hit the studio, aided by a professional producer who volunteers with the group. They also make music videos, which the kids shoot and edit. The body of work Lyricist Society has produced over the years, which you can view online, is honest, smart, often funny, and frequently rooted in history and social issues, a flavor that Neloms, who worked for years as a social studies teacher, is no doubt partially responsible for. Try not to fall in love, for instance, with “Nutrients,” an ode to eating well inspired by the kids’ experience with Neloms’ former classroom neighbor, Marquita Reese, a math teacher/farmer who ran the school farm at Douglass for many years. Rounds of the playful chorus, I love my nutes, gimme some good food, sung just a little off-key, à la Biz Markie, are interwoven with a sweet scene of a mother and son enjoying food together, plus critiques of GMOs, McDonalds and the obesity epidemic. At the end of the track, a sample of some 1969 footage from the Black Panthers’ school lunch program eases in, as the sweet Grant Green-style electric guitar licks play us out. It works because it’s complex, funny, sincere and well-produced. Most of all, nothing feels obvious. “One of the things I really try to help them understand is that you don’t need to sell yourself short talking about the same three things that people stereotype hip hop for,” Neloms says. “You have your own thoughts and experiences. That’s what makes you original. Say that, and people will want to hear what you have to say.”

Neloms and the kids get ready to record at their pop-up studio at Marygrove College in April 2023. Photo by Julianne Lindsey

Creation is obviously crucial to the Lyricist Society process. But Neloms is just as big on the showcase. The idea of helping kids “find their voice” can easily slip into cliché if you don’t have a method. For Neloms, making the music is step one of the Lyricist Society process. Step two is taking the risk of sharing it and getting a chance to experience what it feels like for others to be interested in what you have to say. After their recording phase is complete, they often do live performances, attended by friends and family, where the kids invariably surprise, impress and get smothered with love. When they post the songs and videos to YouTube or social media, the comments sections blow up with positive feedback. Neloms says the kids really started taking him seriously when one of their videos won a Michigan Regional EMMY, just one of several honors they’ve racked up over the years. “Nutrients,” for example, became the anthem played during breakfast at several Detroit schools. U.S. Senator Debbie Stabenow even used it to help promote a nutrition initiative. Now, when the local or national media reach out for an interview, which happens fairly regularly, Neloms says the kids do most of the talking.

* * *

If Neloms’ early recording experience is one parent of Lyricist Society, his Detroit public schools social studies classroom is the other. Neloms started teaching fresh out of college, and although the 22-year-old had strong mentor teachers, the challenge of running a classroom presented a steep learning curve. It was also a tumultuous time for public schools in Detroit. Not having enough books for every student, the shorthand for the city’s lack of resources during that time, was a reality in his social studies classroom. So Neloms looked to his love of hip hop partly as a way to bring new material into the classroom, and partly as a way to connect with his 8th graders, who were, in terms of their musical tastes, still more or less his peers. He translated the heady historical debates between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton and Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Dubois into battle raps, performing both parts, cracking the kids up in the process. He’d go digging through his musical library and find tracks relating to just about any social studies topic: Lupe Fiasco’s “American Terrorist” for the unit on Westward expansion; Jay Z’s “99 Problems” for a discussion on the Bill of Rights and the 4th Amendment. He’d use the songs as a leaping off point for class discussions, putting the lyrics up on the board, analyzing, annotating, asking the kids to offer their take on what they thought the artist was talking about and how it related to what they were learning. One of his go-tos was an original rap he wrote called “Potential and Possibilities,” a call-and-response with the kids that affirmed them and the purpose of their education. Last year, when he ran into one of his students from that era, who’s now in her mid-30s and owns her own business, the introductory shouts of “Mr. Neloms!” were quickly followed by a spontaneous rendition of “Potential and Possibilities.” He wasn’t so shocked she remembered the hook. But the fact she nailed all the lyrics without hesitation showed just how much had stuck.

Photo by Julianne Lindsey

Explicitly validating the value of learning, being creative and geeking out about your interests, no matter what they are, is foundational to Neloms’ approach, largely because it’s a message that greatly influenced the trajectory of his own life. Growing up, Neloms had always been a good student and, at the end of 8th grade, he tested into Cass Tech, one of two competitive magnet high schools in Detroit. But it was a rocky transition. The 8th grade class in his neighborhood school numbered about 20; at Cass, he was one of about a thousand 9th graders. Surrounded by good students and searching for an identity, he decided he didn’t want to be “one of the smart kids.” He took inspiration instead from his favorite hip hop group at the time. “I’d walk into Cass with my skull cap down, thinking I’m Wu-Tang, and I spent more time cultivating that image than I ever did studying,” Neloms says. “I was basically an in-school drop out.” Sometimes when he’d skip class, he’d go to study hall and write rhymes. But it didn’t help his GPA, which was a .896. That summer, he got a letter from Cass stating he wasn’t being invited back sophomore year.

Ask Neloms what turned things around and he’ll warn you of the trip down memory lane that’s about to hit you. The way he talks about the group of male friends he met the summer before 9th grade reminds you just how crucial friendships can be, especially when you’ve endured a prolonged bout of adolescent loneliness. A few years prior, Neloms’ family had moved from a kid-filled apartment building on the east side of Detroit to a west side neighborhood that was mostly seniors. For three years, he floundered. “I mean, it was bad. I’d go outside and play with bugs. I used to pray at night for friends,” he says. One day he took a walk and decided to cross Puritan Avenue, the border of his neighborhood, and discovered all the kids were living on the other side of the street. In particular, the physical juxtaposition of two young men about his age caught his attention. One guy stood over 6 feet, with long dreadlocks and a muscular physique. Next to him walked his friend, who was a little person. A few hours later, he noticed the same pair walking on his side of Puritan, and the desperate Neloms jumped off his porch and got right to the point: “Hey wassup, y’all. You live down there, right? Hey, man, I don’t know nobody. Would y’all be my friends?” When Ferris, the big guy, and Ivan, his buddy, looked at each other and said “sure,” Neloms felt like his prayers were answered.

Neloms (far left) with “the crew”: Lamar (far right), Ferris (middle) and Ivan.

Ferris, Ivan, and their friends Damon and Lamar, whom Neloms would meet soon after, weren’t like anybody he’d met before. Ferris was super into working out and never got anything below a 4.0 in school. Lamar was the artist of the group. Two of the guys studied a dancelike Brazilian martial art called capoeira, which they even got paid to perform from time to time. They all loved hip hop and wrote their own music. “Here was this group of guys that rap, they can fight, they’re strong, they’re smart. I mean, they were Renaissance men,” Neloms says. “And I was inspired by them. But more than that, I realized I was like them. Before that, I was so caught up in this identity thing where I thought I had to be a thug. I thought I had to be like some of the stereotypical portrayals of Black men found in some hip hop music. But with these guys, it wasn’t like that. You could still be yourself. You could embrace your inner nerdom and still feel good about yourself. Achievement was cool.”

Neloms says, more than anything, that nerd ethos is what colors the vibe of Lyricist Society. Culturally, hip hop isn’t typically associated with nerds. But Neloms argues the fact that there’s no formal place for it in the school curriculum means the kids who might be interested in making music aren’t all that different from the early internet geeks of his ’90s upbringing. “There were a lot of kids who were interested in music and art and stuff, but they weren’t interested in being in the band or in the drama club,” Neloms says. “So we created a place where that kind of comradery could happen. They get the T-shirts, they get the hoodies that say Lyricist Society. And they walk down the hall, just like the basketball players with their letterman jackets. It’s a symbol that at school, my interests are considered important. And they have the uniform and the trophies and the highlight reels to prove it.”

* * *

Neloms is a relative newcomer to the ��-Dearborn campus, having begun as an instructor for the social studies methods course a few years ago. He was recruited by Education Professor Julie Taylor, who for years hosted Neloms as a guest lecturer in her courses, where he’d talk with teachers in training about the integration of music into social studies education and its impact on his students. When a lecturer spot opened up, Taylor encouraged Neloms to apply and he’s been part of the education faculty since. Recruiting part-time faculty like Neloms, who have full-time day jobs and may only teach a class or two at the university each year, is crucial to the educational philosophy of the department. In particular, Taylor sees people like Neloms, who are using creative teaching strategies, as being part of the vanguard of educational innovation. In fact, Taylor has co-authored multiple academic articles featuring Neloms’ and his former Douglass colleague Marquita Reese’s work, focusing on the pedagogy behind their creativity.

For sure, having logged 20 years as an educator, including the past few in which he’s transitioned to being a school counselor, Neloms has plenty to offer at the university level. But as an instructor, he prefers to be a “guide on the side” rather than a guy who’s seen to have all the answers. He operates his ��-Dearborn classrooms much the way he does Lyricist Society, with open-ended discussions of ideas designed to help students reckon with complex material and discover and articulate their own perspectives. Given that many of his students are, like him, practicing educators with years of experience, it’s an approach that makes sense. “You hear a lot of people say college is where you learn everybody else’s theory and everybody else’s research, and you lose yourself in it,” Neloms says. “I want them to find themselves in it. I want them to blend the theory with their own perspectives and experiences in a way that makes sense to them. If they take away anything from my course, I want it to be that education doesn’t have to be rote. It can be a passion-filled, creativity-filled endeavor.”

Photo by Julianne Lindsey

Helping a teacher find their particular voice can be significantly more challenging than lecturing on the latest theory. It certainly helps that Neloms is basically a living example of how it can work, and he can talk in methodical detail, complete with PowerPoint slides, about his own journey of using hip hop as an educational scaffold. Going forward, Neloms says he’s starting to think more about how he can add more show to the tell. Specifically, he’s been brainstorming a series of field trips designed to introduce students to less conventional methods that they might be able to incorporate into their own teaching. For example, he’d like to take the class down to the Dequindre Cut, an old below-grade railroad line running through the east side of Detroit that was converted into a pedestrian and cyclist path back in 2008. In more recent years, it’s become known for its increasingly elaborate graffiti, which covers many sections of the tall concrete walls on either side of the cut. Neloms sees the work not only as significant pieces of art, but as sharp social commentary, storytelling and conversations between the artists, many of whom are young people. Also on the field trip agenda: an open mic event in Detroit. While open mics are typically associated with performances of music or poetry, Neloms sees them as a highly adaptable format for showcasing student work of any kind, which he sees as an indispensable part of validating student voices. “But there’s an art to running a great open mic,” he says. “So I want students in the class to see how the pros do it.”

Now two decades into an already impactful career, Neloms can be considered one of the pros himself. Though many of his methods are born from his own interests and experience and sharpened through iteration, it’s worth noting that his general approach has increasingly found validation in the education world. For example, a gamified curriculum called Rhymes with Reason, developed by one of Neloms’ professional acquaintances Austin Martin, uses a close study of hip hop lyrics to teach vocabulary. When Neloms had the students try Rhymes with Reason in his own classroom, he saw their test scores more than double over the course of just a few weeks. And within his own informal experiments, there’s no more validating and satisfying set of results than the growing ranks of Lyricist Society alumni who have gone on to college, many to pursue careers in education or the arts, building on skills they learned in the club. It’s not surprising that many of them regularly drop in on Lyricist Society meetings to mentor the generation coming up behind them.

In many ways, that’s just adding a layer of proof to a truth that Neloms started figuring out when he was a young person himself: If you’re a nerd about something, and you can work up the nerve to show people your real self, it can be a means of opening up an electric point of connection between people. Passion being contagious doesn’t always mean that everyone has to like exactly the same things. It’s the sincerity that’s contagious. It’s the idea that using your voice can help someone else find theirs.

###

Story by Lou Blouin

Faculty and Staff

Off

Thu, 08/10/2023 - 15:00

The veteran Detroit teacher and ��-Dearborn lecturer’s Lyricist Society uses music as a platform to help young people find their voices.

Quan Neloms, third from the right, with members of the Lyricist Society after a recording session on the campus of Marygrove College in Detroit. Photo by Julianne Lindsey

Class of Spring 2023: CEHHS graduate Ezra Houghtby

lblouin — Wed, 26 Apr 2023 13:57:43 +0000

Class of Spring 2023: CEHHS graduate Ezra Houghtby lblouin Wed, 04/26/2023 - 09:57

The challenges facing teachers these days are enough to send many students looking for other majors. But CEHHS senior Ezra Houghtby says he barely had a thought about being anything else. He thinks a big part of why he started chasing a career in education from his very first semester at ��-Dearborn is the respect he’s always had for the teachers in his own life. His mom was a teacher for 10 years. Several close family members have chosen the profession too. And he always valued how his high school teachers would stay well past the final bell to talk to him when he needed a little extra guidance. “I mean, some teachers, it was 3 o’clock and they were out the door,” Houghtby says. “But I always noticed the ones who stayed to talk when a student needed something. I saw them doing this for dozens of students year after year, and I always thought if I could do that just for one person, I’d be doing something that mattered.”

In his years at ��-Dearborn, Houghtby has found plenty of inspiration too. He marveled at Associate Professor of English Literature Erik Bond’s ability to keep students engaged during COVID, especially Bond’s “Mr. Skeptic” video series, in which he played both himself and a character who was constantly questioning key issues he wanted the students to think about. And in Lecturer Anne Thomson’s class, he learned one of his favorite techniques for getting students to participate. In a “fishbowl” discussion, five or six students form an inner circle, while the rest of the class surrounds them in a larger outer circle. The students in the inner circle have a discussion on a given topic, while those in the outer circle have to remain quiet and observe. Students then rotate in and out of the fishbowl, and afterward, everyone debriefs about what they heard. Houghtby loves it because it’s a way for students to practice articulating their viewpoints and listening to others — valuable skills that’ll serve them in both their educational careers and their lives more generally.

During his student teaching this past semester, Houghtby got a chance to see what kind of teacher he’d be, and he found himself drawn to assignments that asked students to learn through empathy. For example, in his 9th grade literature class, he led a unit on Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a novel whose plot takes readers through painful injustices and characters challenged by moral dilemmas. To help the students relate to the themes in the book, Houghtby asked his students to pick a character and create a modern social media profile for the person. The character’s posts had to be rooted in actual dialogue or descriptions from the novel, but they also had to be translated into today’s language and perhaps even comment on modern issues. What would Atticus Finch have had to say about Black Lives Matter, for example? How do the racial injustices in the book resemble what’s going on today? Similarly, in his 9th grade history class, he gave students an assignment to take on the role of an adviser to Martin Luther King Jr. during the height of the Civil Rights Movement. By asking his students to actively relate to others, Houghtby said he could ensure the students would not only engage with the material, but wrestle with its deeper meaning.

Houghtby did have one “cold feet” moment about his career choice. It was last summer, heading into his senior year, when he says the constant stream of news about school violence briefly made him question whether he should, even late in his college career, consider a different path. But in an unfortunate sign of the times, he realized school violence is something he’s actually prepared for as an educator. “I have to put my trust in the fact that if that happens, I know what to do, my school knows what to do, at least as best we know how to,” he says. “In the end, I feel like making a positive impact on people’s lives is what I want to do, and this is the way I can do it best. I guess I just decided I couldn’t abandon my chance to contribute to a community where all people can get the help that they need and be accepted for who they are.”

Houghtby’s hoping to get that opportunity very soon. He’s applying for jobs now and would love to land a job in Dearborn, where some of his early practicum experiences left the strongest impression. Ultimately, he hopes to become a school principal, so he can help the dedicated teachers and staff who, like him, see education not just as a career, but a calling.

###

Story by Lou Blouin

Commencement

College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters

Off

Wed, 04/26/2023 - 13:56

The aspiring high school history and English teacher talks about why empathy is one of the most powerful classroom tools.

Graphic by Violet Dashi

Dania Bazzi’s American Dream

lblouin — Wed, 08 Feb 2023 19:10:27 +0000

Dania Bazzi’s American Dream lblouin Wed, 02/08/2023 - 14:10

Dania Bazzi’s family story is a reminder that the narrative of the American dream, however problematic, isn’t without roots in reality. In the late 1970s, Bazzi’s parents immigrated from Senegal to metro Detroit, where Mary and Al started a convenience store business in Wayne, a working class community in the inner ring of western suburbs. It wasn’t an easy life, though it was unquestionably a good one. Her parents worked a permanent schedule of 12-hour days with no days off, and Bazzi says at least one of them was at the store until they both retired. But it was never boring, nor were they ever lonely. “My parents’ store was almost like a neighborhood meeting place,” Bazzi says. “People would come and talk about their problems or have a cup of coffee. They saw my mother and father as confidants and friends, and that won them a lot of loyalty in a community where running a business wasn’t always easy.” That social currency no doubt served her father well when he later decided to go into local politics, first as a Wayne City Council member and later as the city’s mayor and Wayne County Commissioner. Bazzi and her siblings enlisted as his campaign door knockers to support their dad’s dreams, the way he’d done for them.

Bazzi says Mary and Al were always clear about the reason for moving to the U.S. Ensuring they’d have access to free, quality education was a ticket to giving their kids a more comfortable life, and ideally, one where each of them could pursue careers that fit their passions. Studying hard and getting good grades were taken for granted in their home, and there was never any question about whether Bazzi or her four siblings would go to college. She says it was an easy choice to follow in her two older sisters’ footsteps and enroll at ��-Dearborn, where the smaller class sizes and down-to-earth professors and staff made a shy kid feel safe.

To say Bazzi was a dedicated student is an understatement. Taking advantage of a block-tuition program that allowed students to take up to 18 credits per semester for the price of 12, she earned her bachelor’s in mathematics in three years. During that time, she basically lived on campus between the hours of 8 a.m. and 10 p.m., squeezing in study sessions between classes and surviving on Cottage Inn pizza at the U Mall, a forerunner of the University Center. During her final semester, she interviewed for and landed a job at Ford as a project management consultant, where she was tasked with wrangling white-collar engineers and blue-collar suppliers to make sure cars got built on time. “It’s funny to think about now, but there I was, a 21-year-old, on the phone, trying to get tough with suppliers, threatening that we’d find another supplier or that I’d be there on the due date to pick the parts up myself. And they’d be like, ‘Who is this?’”

Overall, it was a good job, with a good salary and health benefits, and Bazzi says she grew a lot, especially when it came to building professional relationships. But it wasn’t long before she started seriously considering a dream that had always been hanging out somewhere not quite in the back of her mind. She credited her public school teachers with giving her “belief in myself when I didn’t always have it” and had often felt inspired to follow in their footsteps. So while working full-time at Ford, Bazzi headed back to ��-Dearborn for a master’s program designed for working professionals like her who already had a bachelor’s in a teachable subject and wanted to make a pivot to education. Her memory of the program is that it was “robust.” When she hit her first in-classroom practicum, there was definitely part of her that wondered if she’d made the right choice. Even once she took her first job as a high school math teacher, the doubts didn’t disappear immediately. “I remember at the end of my first year, I was talking with my teaching partner who was next door, and I told her ‘I’m never coming back. I’m going back to Ford!’ I was semi-joking. Semi. But I was exhausted. And she literally put her hands on my shoulders and said, ‘Hey, go have a good summer, relax, but I’ll see you next door. After a week or two, you’ll be fine.’”

Her colleague was right. Every year, Bazzi says her confidence grew. She also got more excited about new methods for making math exciting for her students. Her classroom was noisy — in a good way — and she describes her style as a “warm demander,” a term she borrows from teacher educator Zaretta Hammond. Between bells, the expectations for participation were always high, but outside of class, students could come to her for anything. Those five years leading a classroom produced countless good memories. But Bazzi’s strong interest in pedagogy and curriculum innovation eventually led her to take an interview for a school improvement consultant in another district. When she got the formal offer, it was a hard decision to leave the classroom, but ultimately, she thought she’d have a broader impact helping teachers and districts develop exciting new practices. She loved the work, and after two years, it led to a curriculum development director gig at a district near Grand Rapids, a job which still ranks as her all-time favorite. “I basically was able to do all the fun stuff,” Bazzi says. “My job was to listen to the things that teachers or students or administrators needed help with and then figure out how we could do that at a high level. I had no direct reports, no evaluations. I just got to be the creative, fun person and help everybody.”

"I remember at the end of my first year, I was talking with my teaching partner who was next door, and I told her ‘I’m never coming back. I’m going back to Ford!’ I was semi-joking. Semi. But I was exhausted. And she literally put her hands on my shoulders and said, ‘Hey, go have a good summer, relax, but I’ll see you next door. After a week or two, you’ll be fine.'"

Given her passion for new ideas and now with some substantive administrative experience under her belt, a superintendent position was probably inevitable. Her first was at a rural district in west Michigan with barely a thousand students — an experience she still cherishes because of the skills you build in a place with an all-hands-on-deck culture. She talks about leading Ferndale schools, her next stop, the way a proud parent talks about their cool kid with an independent streak. Bazzi came in at a time when school choice was triggering enrollment and financial churn for metro Detroit districts, and under Bazzi’s leadership, Ferndale stabilized enrollment, improved achievement and passed a bond for a new lower elementary school. “Ferndale is a hidden jewel,” she says. “People don’t realize it, but it actually serves four different municipalities, so it’s a very diverse district. In many communities, people have lost connection with their local schools, but I think it’s a great example of what you can accomplish if people are willing to come together, and everybody’s rowing in the same direction.”

More recently, Bazzi has taken a new post, one which she expects will be a more permanent stop. As the superintendent of West Bloomfield School District, she’s again leading a community brimming with diversity and anxious for new ideas. Defying images of the ethnically homogenous outer suburbs, the schools serve large Jewish and Chaldean communities, African American students, who make up about 40 percent of enrollment, and numerous immigrant communities. In all, 61 languages are spoken in West Bloomfield schools. Bazzi says it’s also a district with a history of embracing new ways of doing things. Right now, that means pushing for more diversified learning opportunities, especially focused programs in the trades, career preparation and STEAM. It’s something that’s a big part of their messaging as they advocate for a new bond proposal, which will be in front of voters later this year. She says it makes it a little easier that another bond is expiring, so people will either see their taxes stay the same, if it passes, or go down a little, if the bond fails. Bazzi is hopeful that the community will choose to have strong schools at the heart of their community over a tax break.

Bazzi says West Bloomfield is indeed still one of those places where the schools feel like the center of gravity of community life. Even so, she’s not taking that ethos for granted. Bazzi says she mostly tries to stay out of politics, but her positions are pretty firm when it comes to some of the issues that have recently divided communities and eroded faith in public schools. “To me, and to my parents, our public schools were always one of the things that felt very special about this country,” Bazzi says. “It was a collective commitment that a free, quality education was something every child needed and deserved. I’d be disappointed to see us lose that. I see parents chasing the ‘best-rated’ schools, or being wary, whether consciously or unconsciously, of districts that serve students with lower socioeconomic status or that may be going through troublesome times. But I wish people understood this kind of diversity is part of what makes a school strong. Your child isn’t going to lose out on anything because they sit next to a kid who has different circumstances. They’re going to gain from that. I see it all the time. Our schools are here to ensure that some baseline level of equity in our world can exist. They are not the whole solution, but if we abandon ship on our public schools, I don’t see how this helps anyone. The world is diverse. The world is complex. And I think we’re all better off when we face it together.”

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Story by Lou Blouin

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Wed, 02/08/2023 - 19:09

The two-time ��-Dearborn alum and West Bloomfield superintendent talks about why she’s dedicated her life to education and what we stand to lose when we abandon our faith in public schools.

From left, ��-Dearborn alum Dania Bazzi, her sons Danny and Norman, her niece Celine Haidous, and husband Zach cheer on the West Bloomfield high school football team. Photo courtesy Dania Bazzi

The mistake we keep making with educational technology

lblouin — Mon, 06 Feb 2023 17:28:48 +0000

The mistake we keep making with educational technology lblouin Mon, 02/06/2023 - 12:28

In the mid-1990s, President Bill Clinton made a persistent pitch to voters, and later, to Congress, for a technology revolution in education. It was marked by headline-grabbing initiatives to “put a computer in every American classroom” — and to link all those computers to the “information superhighway by the year 2000.” It was a push that was also motivated, to a large extent, by market forces. Fundamentally, there was a fear that unless we equipped classrooms with the latest technology, the American economy could, at best, lack a sufficient workforce to power new industries. At worst, it could lose its innovative dominance. But ��-Dearborn Educational Technology Professor Mesut Duran argues that despite this strategy having a certain appeal, it was, in some ways, not all that fleshed out. “At the time, the administration’s own report even acknowledged that research on technology’s impact on education was inadequate, but still recommended that ‘deployment of technology in American schools [not] be deferred depending on the research.’” The message, he says, was buy the latest technology and worry about the details later.

Education Professor Mesut Duran

Duran, whose new book chronicles 30 years of big moments in the history of educational technology, says the Clinton anecdote exemplifies a type of thinking that’s historically defined our approach to technology and education. Rather than take a nuanced look at educational needs and then design technologies around them, we tend to embrace the latest exciting technological trend and then go hunting for classroom applications. To take one of the most recent examples, Duran says the initial COVID shockwave sent schools scrambling for quick technological solutions. With most schools closed to in-person learning, the early adaptation paradigm consisted of learn-from-home education powered by Zoom classrooms and low-priced Chromebooks. The approach seemed to make sense at the time, and certain mistakes can be forgiven considering the unusual circumstances. But students and teachers alike quickly learned the setup was far from ideal. “We know that Chromebooks require high-speed internet connections, so immediately we ran into digital divide issues,” Duran says. “And what about students with special needs, did they have access to assistive technologies? What about home use of the technology outside of school uses and the legal and ethical issues that come with that? And did teachers have training in the strategies for making remote learning effective in K-12 education? This techno-centrism — purchasing the next big gadget, without giving consideration to other important factors — often doesn’t lead to the best results.”

So how can we do better? As the COVID-Chromebook example illustrates, Duran thinks we’d benefit from looking at educational technology as a complex system, with political, social, and economic dimensions that transcend the actual hardware and software. To deploy technologies effectively, we have to make sure we’re accounting for all the ways these tools can alter the learning environment in both the short and long term. Does the purchase of Chromebooks, for example, fit into a schools long-term technology plan? Can the district afford to upgrade them when they’re obsolete in three to four years? Will teachers be receptive to, say, a new learning analytics system, do they have time to learn how to use it, and will it ultimately be that helpful? And fundamentally, is a particular technology a good fit for the challenge we’re hoping to solve? These are questions Duran says schools often fail to resolve when facing an alluring new technology purchase, leading to mixed results and wasted money.

Moreover, Duran argues that we’d be better served by a paradigm in which known educational needs are driving technological innovation, rather than the other way around. As a case study, he points to the success of assistive learning technologies designed to help students with specific disabilities. Hearing aids or text-to-speech scanning pen readers for students with vision impairments aren’t particularly flashy. But Duran argues they’re unquestionably effective precisely because they were designed to meet specific human needs. “I think it’s fair to say that special education has seen the most unqualified success in this realm because they’ve come at it from the right starting point,” Duran says. “It’s the opposite of an approach where you invent something and then let students or teachers try to figure out a use for it.” Indeed, the growing commercial pressure exerted by the educational technology industry is a part of this conversation that Duran says can’t be ignored. Globally, “EdTech” is now a $200 billion industry. Powered by growth in AI and virtual reality, it could touch the $1 trillion mark by 2030, much of it aimed at K-12 schools. Duran says companies have a powerful incentive to keep their latest creations flowing into our education system. But beyond the point of purchase, it typically falls to schools to figure out the complexities of how to get the most out of them.

Heeding Duran’s call to develop a new, healthier relationship to educational technology arguably couldn’t come at a better time. COVID has disrupted long-standing traditions in both K-12 and higher education, and combined with new disruptive technologies, companies are eager to show us a new way of doing things. After two decades in which STEM dominated the educational technology arena, Duran says artificial intelligence is poised to define a new era. In the present and near-future, that’s likely to come in the form of “learning analytics” — systems that can track, measure and analyze our behavior and biology for signs of engagement and learning challenges alike. Duran says whether such technologies make their imprint on education before their well-documented issues with privacy, racial bias, ethics and overall effectiveness are resolved, is still, for the time being, our choice to make.

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Do you want more of Professor Mesut Duran’s analysis of major moments in the history of educational technology? Check out his new book, “Learning Technologies: Research, Trends, and Issues in the U.S. Education System.”

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