Health and Human Services

Vitalis Im’s winding, unexpected path to academia

lblouin — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 15:49:08 +0000

Vitalis Im’s winding, unexpected path to academia lblouin Mon, 01/20/2025 - 10:49

Violinist. Opera singer. Therapist. Professor and researcher. Vitalis Im, the Health and Human Services Department’s newest assistant professor, has collected a list of life experiences that makes you think a career in academia wasn’t always his life goal. Indeed, Im says that is entirely true, and, in fact, it was far from a sure thing he'd even attend college. Growing up in a low-income family in rural upstate New York, the only Asian American student in a town of about 2,000 people whose high school was colloquially referred to as a “dropout factory,” Im describes his younger self as someone who “didn’t have any purpose in life and definitely wasn’t thinking about what I wanted to do with my future.” Then, sort of out of nowhere, at age 16, he developed an intense interest in classical music. He says it was kind of weird, actually, because listening to music of any genre wasn’t part of his childhood or adolescence. But browsing YouTube one day, he ran across a recording of the Second Movement of Bach’s Violin Concerto in D Minor and couldn’t stop listening to it. Things snowballed from there, and he immersed himself in classical music the way other kids his age consumed pop or hip hop. One day, he confided in his school librarian that he was interested in learning to play the violin. As it happened, she was also taking violin lessons, and she offered to give Im her spare instrument if he promised to practice every day.

The librarian also gave him the phone number of the woman she was taking lessons from — Anastasia Solberg — who owned a small music school in town. Im knew he couldn’t afford the lessons, but he called Solberg anyway, and after meeting with her, she offered to give him lessons for free. He took his practice seriously, and after discovering he actually had a talent for it, he started thinking about music as something he could do with his life. He knew, having started lessons so late, he probably couldn’t get into a decent music school. So he enrolled at the nearby community college, where he ended up studying music for three years. Then, in what he calls a “Hail Mary application,” he applied to Bard College, a private liberal arts school in upstate New York, and got in. Im says Bard was a big turning point in his life. His plans going in were to major in music, which he did, though he later switched from violin to voice after discovering a latent talent as an opera singer. But Bard’s educational philosophy was also to foster well-rounded people and interdisciplinary thinking. “At Bard, it was, like, ‘You’re studying music, but what else?’” Im says. For him, that other thing, and second major, turned out to be anthropology. Early on, he remembers taking a class called “Race and Nature in Africa,” which he says was the first time he was introduced to the idea of race as a “concept.” “It was super mind blowing for me, and really put so much of my own life experience in perspective,” Im says. “And this was also a time when Black Lives Matter was gaining steam, so it was also connecting me to politics and so much of what was going on in the world. I had attended community college for three years, but this was the first time I really felt intellectually stimulated — that my brain got moving in that way.”

Im’s experience at Bard was so meaningful that it left him, maybe for the first time in his life, with a fairly clear picture of what he wanted to do. “I loved academia. I love the idea of sitting around and talking about ideas,” Im says. “It seemed like a luxury to think that’s even something you can do.” Still, it sort of remained a dream, and, at first, he didn’t see the path he’d follow to get there — other than knowing it would require a PhD. After graduating from Bard, he made ends meet for a couple years by teaching music lessons and working as a personal care aide for people with traumatic brain injuries. The latter he characterizes succinctly as “very hard work,” something he says he’d never want to do again. But it did open an unfiltered line of sight into the social services system and how inefficient it can be for people. Social work wasn’t something he’d really considered for a career before. But after that experience, he began thinking about it as a real possibility, even if he didn’t see how his background in music and anthropology would get him there. Then, in another twist of good luck, it turned out his undergraduate anthropology mentor at Bard had studied at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. During a chat with her one day, she tipped him off that the university had a joint social work-anthropology program. It felt fortuitous, and he decided to apply.

In Ann Arbor, Im flourished. He says he’s always seen value in knowing how to do a lot of things, and grad school enabled him to explore a whole new set of interests. In the same way that race emerged as a theme during his undergraduate years, masculinity became the framework for much of his graduate studies — inspired, in part, by the reckoning with male identities that was triggered by the #MeToo movement. During one of his field placements, he worked with men in a program called Alternatives to Domestic Aggression, which was run by a local Catholic social services organization. The heart of the program was a regular group meeting, where men who had committed acts of violence against their domestic partners would, with the help of a facilitator, sort through the messy business of accountability, self-reflection and, in many cases, their own experiences as victims of violence. Im says it was a life-changing experience. He remembers, in particular, being totally floored by the skills of the group facilitator, Jeffrie Cape. “She was incredibly kind and generous, but she also wouldn’t hesitate to lay you flat when you needed it,” Im says. “And you had to be like that. Eighty-five percent of these men were court mandated and they did not want to be there. They would push back and do all kinds of things to obfuscate their responsibility. So she was never just kind or never just super blunt. She was able to see that contradiction and just kind of hold it. That’s what the situation demanded. That was the kind of intimacy you needed to do the work.”

Im says working with the men was a profoundly challenging experience. But it also taught him something important about himself — namely, that he was made of stuff that could weather that kind of emotional intensity and therefore help people. “One of the things I learned is that there are very few spaces in the world where people can be ugly, and therapy is a space for that,” Im says. “But to have spaces for that, you need people who can tolerate that.” As Im began thinking more deeply about his own approach as a therapist, he found himself returning to an important part of his past. The idea that he might combine arts and music with therapy was, he says, motivated in small part by some of the literature he was reading; but mostly because he missed doing music and wanted to figure out some way to bring his passions together. “I mean, music was life changing for me,” he says. “Without it, I don’t know where I would be. So that was sort of on my mind. Prison, violence, men, art — just sort of thinking through all of it.”

Around that time, in another instance of serendipity, he met a woman named Mary Heinen McPherson. Heinen McPherson began serving a life sentence in 1976, and while in prison, became a leading advocate for the rights of incarcerated people. Among the many things she accomplished before she was even released after a sentence commutation in 2002 was co-founding U-M’s Prison Creative Arts Project, which brings various people impacted by the justice system together around the arts. Heinen McPherson was looking for someone to go to a prison and lead a music-based workshop and asked Im if he was interested. He couldn’t say ‘yes’ fast enough. Arts-based workshops in prisons have basically been a major theme of his life, teaching and research ever since. As someone who is an artist himself, you might expect Im to be an unabashed evangelist for the power of the arts to profoundly impact people in prisons. But his own view is that we should be careful about romanticizing the arts. Im says it is absolutely true that the arts have many practical benefits for people in prisons. Often, the value of a workshop is simply breaking up the intense monotony of prison life. Sometimes, the value lies in giving people space to do something human that’s generally not allowed in prison, like laughing or “being able to complain about sh*t.” Sometimes it’s deeper, like when a person experiences poetry as a powerful medium for self-reflection or discovers a latent talent for writing. (Im says you’d be amazed how many guys are naturals at improv theater.) But he says the same vulnerability that the arts inspire can also be “weaponized.” He tells the story of a man who attended one of his poetry workshops and would write “stacks of pages” of poetry every week, often exploring deep topics, like what it’s like to be a gay man living in a prison. Then, one day, during a lockdown event, Im says this man’s cell was searched and the guards discovered his writing. They took turns reading it aloud to each other, laughing, and then tore it up. “So, you know, one of the goals is to give people a chance to exercise parts of their humanity that have been taken away,” Im says. “But their humanity can be turned against them. Vulnerability is not always rewarded in prison. The arts aren’t some kind of magic shield against the violence of prison.”

More recently, Im has become deeply interested in the arts as a communication vehicle between people in prisons and people who live in the free world. Particularly, he’s interested in exploring what power the arts have to help the latter understand the former. After all, unless you have been impacted by the justice system yourself, or have a close loved one who has, you likely have never been to a prison and don’t have any reason or occasion to interact with someone who has been in one. But “art travels,” Im says. Art, writing and poetry can be exhibited and shared outside prison walls, and people who run prisons, surprisingly, often have few objections to doing so. People in prisons can make podcasts. And it all has the potential to help those living in the free world understand — in a nonabstract way — the humanity of people in prisons, and how our lives on the outside depend, in some ways, on us being explicitly or implicitly OK with more than a million Americans living behind bars.

Right now, Im is pondering creative new ways to probe that space, including one project focused on homemade greeting cards, a popular medium that many people in prisons use to communicate with people on the outside. (Im says making greeting cards is also one of the few “honest ways to make a living” in prison.) And he’s also working on a pilot program that would provide free therapeutic services for formerly incarcerated people in Michigan, which he’s hoping can launch this fall. That’s on top of his heavy teaching duties, which new assistant professors are, of course, expected to shoulder. Thankfully, Im says classroom life has been a pleasure so far, in no small part because he feels an affinity with many of his students. “I think, in general, students at ��-Dearborn are very pragmatic,” Im says. “Part of it is a class difference. Many of them are getting a degree so they can start working, which I’m really sympathetic to, actually. I mean, when I was at community college, it was ‘get me out of here so I can do what I need to do,’ which was to make money.” On the other hand, Im loves that he can also give his students a kind of experience that he had at Bard. He knows his “Death, Dying and Bereavement” course, which he taught last semester, may not be as essential to their life goals as organic chemistry. But there’s no missing seeing their eyes — and perspectives — widen when they discuss, for example, how some cultures see cannibalism as a perfectly normal way of mourning loved ones. “To dive into those cross-cultural perspectives with them, to think generously and relatively — that’s kind of the whole point of college,” Im says. “To engage in this intellectual curiosity kind of for its own sake, not the sake of something else — that still feels like such a luxury to me. And when you have other more practical things in your life you have to worry about, like paying your bills or taking care of a family, you don’t always have space for that. So it’s a real joy to be able to share that kind of experience with them.”

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Story by Lou Blouin

Arts

Faculty and Staff

Faculty Research

College of Education, Health, and Human Services

Health and Human Services

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Mon, 01/20/2025 - 15:48

The new Health and Human Services assistant professor talks about his prior experience as a musician and therapist, his life’s serendipitous turning points, and his current research on the impact of the arts on people in prisons.

Assistant Professor of Health and Human Services Vitalis Im started at ��-Dearborn in Fall 2024.

Student researchers share what they learned during SURE 2024

jpow — Thu, 19 Sep 2024 15:55:35 +0000

Student researchers share what they learned during SURE 2024 jpow Thu, 09/19/2024 - 11:55

In just a few short years since its founding in 2018, the Summer Undergraduate Research Experience has grown into a mainstay of the campus’ burgeoning research culture. The program pairs faculty mentors and undergraduate students for an 8-12 week summer session in which the student researchers get to do hands-on research, attend professional development sessions and get paid a $3,200 stipend. SURE continued its steady growth this year, providing opportunities for 49 students (up from 32 in 2023), who worked in areas ranging from artificial intelligence and renewable energy to reproductive rights and healthcare. So what are students taking away from this year’s experience? Recently, we talked with two SURE researchers from the College of Engineering and Computer Science and College of Education, Health and Human Services about what they learned this summer. Next week, we’ll have student stories from the College of Business and College of Arts, Sciences and Letters.

Rayan Khalil and Assistant Professor Van Hai Bui
Project: Assessment of solar energy generation towards net-zero energy buildings

Software engineering senior Rayan Khalil says she was drawn to the SURE program mostly because the idea of doing research “just sounded like a really fulfilling experience.” It didn’t disappoint. This summer, Khalil and her faculty mentor, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Van Hai Bui, ticked through a big list of projects focusing on solar energy generation for net-zero buildings. Specifically, Khalil built detailed models that predict how much solar-based electricity a building might expect to produce, given geographically specific variables like wind speed, temperature, day length, cloud cover and the amount of sunlight a site receives in a typical year. Based on those prediction models, she then created an optimization model for net-zero buildings to determine the lowest-cost solar and battery storage installations, while minimizing the amount of purchased power buildings would have to draw from the grid. She even built a user-friendly interface that enables building operators to quickly plug in site-specific variables and get accurate prediction and optimization scenarios.

Rayan Khalil (right) and Assistant Professor Van Hai Bui

Khalil says the summer felt like a super- accelerated learning experience: “In some ways, I feel like I learned as much as I did in two years in two months,” she says. She chalks that up to a couple of factors. First, she’s always had a “passion for sustainability,” and getting to apply her coding skills to something she was really interested in made the whole thing feel “a lot more fulfilling.” Second, unlike in a lot of her courses, there wasn’t a test waiting for her at the end. “Research isn’t one of those things where the answer is already predetermined, so one of the things I loved is that if I tried something and it didn’t work out, I felt like I could learn from that and try something else without worrying that I was going to be graded harshly if I didn’t do it a certain way,” she says. Indeed, Bui won’t be grading Khalil. But he says she accomplished a phenomenal amount of work over the summer, and the prediction models she worked on could be useful in upcoming projects he has planned with DTE. The two are also planning to present their findings at an upcoming conference, for which Khalil is writing the paper. “To maybe have a publication with my name on it — that’s just insane,” she says. It might not be the last either. Heading into her senior year, she says the goal was to finally be done with school and score a full-time job. Now, based on her SURE experience, she’s thinking seriously about grad school.

Sarah Chaban and Associate Professor Lisa Martin
Project: Reproductive freedom on the ballot: How gender and demands for self-determination are driving electoral politics in the post-Roe era

Professor of Health and Human Services Lisa Martin’s first piece of advice for her SURE research partner Sarah Chaban: Set up a new email account. That’s because over the course of the summer, Chaban would be tracking trends in how people are talking about reproductive rights during the election season, a conversation which, needless to say, inspires an intensity that you don't necessarily want flooding your personal email accounts. For her project, Chaban kept tabs on numerous sources, including social media accounts, advertisements, podcasts, state ballot referendums, newsletters and news articles, with a particular focus on language trends. A few of her takeaways thus far? At the highest level, she says voices on the left and right are speaking very different languages, with the latter emphasizing fetal personhood and the former framing things in terms of rights and healthcare. Moreover, especially in the realm of laws and ballot initiatives, there tends to be more uniformity on the right, which Martin and Chaban say reflects a strategy of replicating approaches which have worked well in other states. On the other side, ballot language tends to vary widely both in breadth and emphasis, with states emphasizing (one or multiple) rights and/or healthcare, depending on what organizers think will speak to their constituencies. Overall, Chaban says one of her biggest findings is that the conversation around reproductive rights now has multiple volatile fault lines. Within the post-Roe legal framework, access to contraception and fertility treatments, like IVF, are now being debated sometimes as intensely as abortion.

Sarah Chaban (left) and Professor Lisa Martin

Chaban says one of the biggest lessons she’s drawing from her research experience is how important critical thinking skills are — especially when responding to unexpected challenges. For example, during her project, President Joe Biden, a candidate who rarely uses the word abortion, withdrew from the presidential race, and Vice President Kamala Harris, who uses very different language when speaking about reproductive rights, became the Democratic nominee. “I thought, how am I supposed to put together my poster now that the world has just changed?” Chaban says, smiling. “But this just showed me that when you’re tracking something in real time, you can’t get stuck in your ways of thinking about things. Whatever changes might come, you have to pivot. No knowledge is lost.” Her experience this summer also changed the way she’s thinking about her future. Chaban was originally planning on pursuing a master’s in public health after graduation. But after seeing how many influential voices in the reproductive rights space have legal backgrounds, she’s thinking about law school. And if she can’t choose between the two, she has her eye on the dual degree in Law and Public Health (JD+MPH) at the University of Michigan.

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Want to read more about what students are taking away from SURE 2024? Next week, we’ll feature students from the College of Business and College of Arts, Sciences and Letters. Story by Lou Blouin. Photos by Annie Barker.

Research

Student Success

College of Education, Health, and Human Services

Health and Human Services

College of Engineering and Computer Science

Electrical and Computer Engineering

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Wed, 09/18/2024 - 15:55

The Summer Undergraduate Research Experience had another record year, serving 49 students in 2024. We check in with students and their faculty mentors in each of the colleges, starting with CECS and CEHHS.

CEHHS student Sofia Martínez Barredo presents her research findings during the 2024 Summer Undergraduate Research Experience showcase on Sept. 17.

Class of Fall 2023: CEHHS graduate Briana Hurt

lblouin — Wed, 06 Dec 2023 14:08:34 +0000

Class of Fall 2023: CEHHS graduate Briana Hurt lblouin Wed, 12/06/2023 - 09:08

Whether it's checking off the last few upper-level classes in a major or completing an internship, senior years are typically more about finishing what you started than discovering new interests. For December graduate Briana Hurt, though, her final undergraduate year at ��-Dearborn has featured a little of both. As planned and on time, she'll be finishing her Health and Human Services degree, leaving her a clear path to a job or a spot in grad school in social work or public health — if that’s still what she wants to do. But as she heads toward the commencement stage, there's been a steady internal debate about the path ahead, mostly as a result of new passions she's discovered in the past year.

Hurt says the initial spark came during a class project in a Health and Human Services course taught by Assistant Professor Finn Bell. The students were charged with conducting a community needs assessment, and Hurt chose to focus on her own and other east side Detroit neighborhoods. Dozens of conversations with friends, relatives and neighbors revealed persistent challenges around food access. It was an eye opening experience, one that led Hurt not only to do a deep dive into the complex relationship between food and health but food and politics. “You get out into the neighborhoods and it’s not hard to see the unequal distribution of resources,” Hurt says. “Some neighborhoods have a Whole Foods Market, and in other neighborhoods, residents have to walk close to a mile to the grocery store, which may or may not have quality produce.” Hurt learned about how this phenomenon of “food deserts” — or what some academics and activists call a system of “food apartheid” — leads to systemic health disparities and long-lasting impacts on residents' and neighborhoods’ socioeconomic well-being. The following summer, Hurt traveled deeper down the food politics rabbit hole with Bell, working as a research assistant in the Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) program. Her work focused on collecting oral histories from BIPOC farmers and gardeners in the Ypsilanti area.

During her senior year, Hurt discovered a passion for agriculture. She interned with Keep Growing Detroit, a nonprofit that operates several urban farms in the city and runs a variety of educational programs. (Photo courtesy Briana Hurt)

In a matter of months, Hurt says she was transformed from a person who’d never grown anything but house plants to someone who cared deeply about agriculture and its potential to improve communities. And the very next term, her final at ��-Dearborn, she set herself up for another transformative experience. Hurt enrolled in Semester in Detroit, a program run by ��-Ann Arbor that’s open to students on all three campuses, which allows students to live, learn and work in the city alongside community leaders doing grassroots work. It may seem like a strange choice for a Detroit native who’d lived her entire life in the city. But Hurt says it didn’t take long to discover how much she didn’t know about Detroit — and just how inspiring and complex it could be. She learned about the rich history of Paradise Valley and Black Bottom, a vibrant, predominantly Black residential and commercial district that was razed for a mid-century interstate. She learned about Detroit’s significant role in the Underground Railroad, and also the deep racial and socioeconomic divides that fueled the 1967 uprising in the city. She was especially inspired by the life of Grace Lee Boggs, a Chinese American writer and activist who moved to Detroit in the 1950s and became, along with her husband and fellow activist James Boggs, an intellectual force in multiple social justice movements.

“I think the biggest shocker, outside of learning all this history, is why it took so long for me to learn it,” Hurt says. “I’ve lived here my whole life, went to school here, but it took until my senior year of college to discover any of this.” Hurt’s still mulling over why that might be. She thinks part of it has to do with people’s tendencies to want simple narratives — to define Detroit as “The Motor City,” or more recently, as a “revitalization” story. “But the real story is so much deeper and I’ve personally developed a lot of inspiration and appreciation from learning that history,” she says. “I think I was one of those people who would say that they were ‘proud’ to be from Detroit but maybe didn’t know what that meant as much as I do now. Now, I feel like I can articulate why. I have the reasons, and I can share that knowledge with others so maybe they can see the city the way I do.”

Most recently, Hurt got an opportunity to knit together her bolstered love for her hometown with her new interest in agriculture. As part of the Semester in Detroit program, Hurt is doing an internship with Keep Growing Detroit, a nonprofit that operates several urban farms and educational programs to support the organization’s goal of making Detroit a “food sovereign” city. Her work has focused on coordinating volunteers and essential farm chores like harvesting and weeding. Through that experience, she’s discovered the incomparable taste of a fresh-picked heirloom tomato, the joy of “getting lost” in a cucamelon bush and her intense phobia of bugs.

Read about ��-Dearborn student Tepfirah Rushdan, former co-director of Keep Growing Detroit and the City of Detroit’s first director of urban agriculture.

So what’s next for Hurt? That’s the question of the moment. Ever since she chose her Health and Human Services major at the end of her first year, she says the plan was to relocate after graduation, preferably somewhere without cold winters, and get a job in the public health or social work field. That’s still on the table, as is grad school in either discipline. But now she’s also seriously considering sticking closer to home, maybe even Detroit, and pursuing something related to agriculture. She has her eye on the organic agriculture program at Michigan State University, and would love to continue working with the farmers, historians and community organizations that have taken her under their wing this past year.

"In the past year, I’ve just been embraced by people and the community in a way that’s totally surprised me and it’s changed the way I think about things,” she says. "Recently, I kind of shared some of the inner conflict I’ve been feeling with Julia Putnam, the principal at the (James and) Grace Lee Boggs school, and she shared this idea from the poet Antonio Machado that ‘you make the path by walking it.’ That really stuck with me. Everything in your life can’t be preplanned. So that’s what I’m trying to focus on now: Taking my steps, following what I’m passionate about and being open to whatever happens next.”

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Story by Lou Blouin

College of Education, Health, and Human Services

Health and Human Services

Off

Wed, 12/06/2023 - 14:08

A few pleasant senior year surprises have ignited the December graduate’s interest in urban agriculture, Detroit history and social justice. Could a last-minute career pivot be on the horizon?

Graphic by Violet Dashi

Building a ‘culture of health’ for all Dearborn residents

rudmehta — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 17:23:21 +0000

Building a ‘culture of health’ for all Dearborn residents rudmehta Wed, 12/14/2022 - 12:23

Healthy Dearborn—a community coalition anchored by Beaumont Health, the City of Dearborn and Dearborn Public Schools—may only be a few years old. But its 500-plus members already have racked up an impressive list of victories—including a new bike share project, multiple community fitness programs, improvements to the local farmers market and a robust research team that’s providing data-driven insight into the health needs of Dearborn residents.

The goal is to build a holistic “culture of the health” in the city by improving access to healthy foods and supporting active lifestyles. But as Healthy Dearborn forges ahead, steering committee member and ��-Dearborn Sociology Professor Carmel Price said there’s a renewed emphasis on ensuring the coalition’s work is addressing health priorities for all—and not just some—of Dearborn’s residents.

“The challenge we recognized is that the people who are shaping the conversations are often those who already have more resources,” Price said. “But what about the parts of the city where there are higher rates of chronic conditions? Do they have representation in the Healthy Dearborn coalition? Are they included in the conversations that shape policy and programs? We didn’t want all this great work we’re doing to reinforce the inequities that exist.”

While health disparities have always been part of the Healthy Dearborn mission, Price said it’s become a higher priority since the release of new health data from the Centers for Disease Control. The CDC’s 500 Cities project, detailing chronic disease risk factors and health outcomes in America’s 500 largest cities, painted a picture of a heterogeneous community, where some neighborhoods had far different health outcomes than others. Among the major storylines revealed in the data: Residents in east and south side neighborhoods, which border some of the heaviest industry in metro Detroit, had higher rates of asthma and COPD than their west side neighbors.

New health data from the Centers for Disease Control shows residents in east and south side neighborhoods had higher rates of asthma and COPD than their west side neighbors.

“When we typically think about healthy living, we think about exercising more or eating better,” Price said. “But when we held some community forums on the south side, the resounding message from residents was that their biggest need was air quality—and the fact they didn’t feel comfortable being active outside because of air quality. So it was a much different set of challenges that require a different kind of work than the coalition had done so far.”

Price’s good friend and ��-Dearborn colleague Natalie Sampson has been crucial in that work on the south side of the city. The assistant professor of public health and veteran of air quality campaigns in neighboring Detroit also has enlisted students in one of her public health courses to help facilitate community forums. Sampson said some students, like Karima Alwisha, a south Dearborn resident and public health major, have emerged as strong community leaders.

That work has inspired what Sampson calls “a separate but closely related” new initiative called Environmental Health Research to Action (EHRA). Through EHRA, Sampson, her students, Price, and key community leaders and partners are undertaking several new projects around air pollution, including building an air quality report for the city and launching a summer youth academy.

“The idea is to not just get youth to understand air quality issues—they live there, they know all about that,” Sampson said. “But we can help train them in the science, the epidemiology, how to do air monitoring—and how you can then take that and create a policy advocacy strategy.”

This semester, students in Sampson’s Community Organizing for Health course also worked on so-called “shared use policies.”

“Given that there’s interest in physical activity, but people can’t always be active outside, Healthy Dearborn is trying to make sure people have access to indoor public spaces, like high school gyms, after hours, for exercise,” Sampson said. “So students are researching existing resources and policies and what other communities have done to see if this makes sense for Dearborn.”

Sampson and Price said creative solutions like these are indicative of the contributions the ��-Dearborn community is making in the push to make the city a healthier place. In all, more than 50 faculty, staff and students have lent their effort and expertise to various Healthy Dearborn coalition projects.

“Our students are a critical piece of getting this work done,” Price said. “The coalition members are developing strategic plans and action plans, but when it comes to implementation, we’ve really relied on students to make these ideas a reality. And our researchers—here and at Wayne State and elsewhere—are writing grants, doing data collection, and providing all kinds of expertise. So it’s incredibly exciting to see us building momentum.”

Experiential Learning

College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters

Behavioral Sciences

College of Education, Health, and Human Services

Health and Human Services

Metropolitan Impact

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��-Dearborn faculty, staff and students are helping the Healthy Dearborn coalition take on its biggest challenge yet: tackling the city’s health disparities.

Children play in the shadow of heavy industry in a south Dearborn neighborhood. Photo courtesy of Healthy Dearborn.

This 4+1 program is giving students better options for careers in social work

lblouin — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 16:55:59 +0000

This 4+1 program is giving students better options for careers in social work lblouin Wed, 12/07/2022 - 11:55

��-Dearborn Health and Human Services senior Riley Day hadn't really considered a career in social work until she took her first couple classes in the subject and got hooked. After that, her previous goal of being a child life specialist, a very focused branch of pediatric health care, seemed a bit too narrow compared with all the options she’d have as a social worker. Day particularly loved the holistic approach that the field takes to supporting people, which is something she’d experienced firsthand at the family service agency she volunteered with while in high school. “I worked in the childcare center, and you’d be spending time with the kids when the parents were doing a parenting class or someone was helping them find some economic opportunities,” Day says. “The more I learned, the more I saw how everything in a person’s life is interconnected, and it’s not just one thing that can bring someone’s life back into balance. So how could I work in just one area?”

There was just one snag with Day switching gears. While ��-Dearborn has three versatile Health and Human Services (HHS) major concentrations, and some great courses in social work, the university doesn't formally offer a Bachelor of Social Work (BSW) — the degree many students pursue when they’re looking to get into the field. However, shortly after Day started at ��-Dearborn in 2019, the university started offering a degree program with arguably more perks than a BSW. Through a partnership with the Ann Arbor campus, which has a top-ranked social work program, ��-Dearborn HHS undergrads could earn a U-M Master of Social Work degree (MSW) with just one additional year of study.

Here’s how the Human Services and Social Work 4+1 program works: During their first three academic years at ��-Dearborn, Health and Human Services students interested in social work complete their required courses for the Bachelor of Science in HHS with a Human Services concentration. Then, by March 1 of their junior year, they can apply for admission to the 4+1. If accepted, ��-Dearborn seniors take four graduate courses that count toward both the completion of their undergraduate HHS degree at ��-Dearborn and their U-M School of Social Work MSW. Then, after completing their bachelor's, students fully matriculate into the MSW program and can finish in as little as three additional semesters.

For Day, the 4+1 was a great fit. Now in the first semester of the program, she says her experience has been really positive. One of the things she appreciates — and which has also been a bit of an adjustment — is taking classes with older students who have more robust social work experiences, including many who have been working as social workers for years. “Some of my classmates have traveled abroad to work, they are married with kids, they moved here from other states to study, and I was feeling a little like, ‘I’m very much at the beginning of my career, my bachelor’s has not solely been in social work, and I’m still very much learning,’” Day says. “I think part of me was wondering if I was too young to be here, and that maybe I needed to get some more experience and then come back. But the flip side of that is it’s pretty amazing to have classmates with different backgrounds and so much experience, because they can speak to how things are in the places they’re coming from. I honestly feel like I’m getting so much more out of my classes because of that.”

U-M Associate Professor Katie Richards-Schuster, who’s been involved with the planning of the program since the beginning, says making sure the 4+1 students feel like they belong is something the program administrators always have their eye on. For example, while they don’t call out a student’s 4+1 status to the whole class, they do let faculty know when they have undergraduates in one of their courses. “We want our faculty to be prepared that students may have a lot of questions, so they may want to check in to make sure they feel confident or have what they need,” Richards-Schuster says. “Knowing that students might need a little extra nudge to participate, a faculty member may also want to find ways for them to speak up in class; for example, starting with pairs, then small groups, so it’s not always just one big class discussion.”

That’s a strategy Lecturer Grace Helms-Kotre has used effectively in her MSW courses, where she frequently asks students to write personal reflections on class topics. That provides students a chance to test drive and get feedback on their ideas in a more private setting, while giving her a window into how they’re doing both personally and academically. Day, who has Helms-Kotre this semester, says she’s really valued having that platform, and it’s helped reassure her that she deserves to be there. Regarding performance, the results have been definitive thus far: Richards-Schuster says faculty consistently report that 4+1 students, which include Dearborn HHS students and sociology undergrads from the Ann Arbor campus, are doing some of the best written and theoretical work.

Only a handful of students from Dearborn have enrolled in the program so far, but applications are showing signs of picking up in 2023. In many ways, Richards-Schuster thinks a slow start is probably a good thing, because there are always administrative and scheduling bugs to work out when you’re coordinating systems between two campuses. Based on the feedback of some of the early enrollees, they’ve also built out a more comprehensive set of programs to strengthen the cohort experience and guide students on admissions, financial aid and different tracks within the MSW program.

Day doesn’t mind being an early adopter/guinea pig. For her, the timing of the program launch was fortuitous, and she says she’s received a ton of support from advisers on both the Dearborn and Ann Arbor sides. She’s also starting to get more questions about the 4+1 from students coming up behind her, which bodes well for the future of the program. “I actually had a classmate ask me about it when I was applying, because she was kind of in the same boat I was in,” Day says. “She wanted to do social work with geriatric populations, but we didn’t have the BSW. Obviously, this gives you the option to get a social work degree, but being able to reduce the time and money it takes to get a graduate degree is huge. So I’m happy to answer any questions and be an ambassador, because I definitely think it’s a great option for a lot of students.”

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Are you interested in learning more about the 4+1 MSW program? Get more information and learn how to apply. Story by Lou Blouin

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Launched two years ago, the program allows ��-Dearborn undergraduates to get a Master of Social Work from Ann Arbor with just one extra year of study. So how is the program going so far?

Health and Human Services student Riley Day is taking advantage of a unique program that is allowing her to get a head start on her ��-Ann Arbor Master of Social Work degree while still a senior at ��-Dearborn. Photo courtesy Riley Day

When content isn’t king

lblouin — Wed, 09 Nov 2022 16:52:37 +0000

When content isn’t king lblouin Wed, 11/09/2022 - 11:52

Many ��-Dearborn faculty and administrators are currently engaged in an effort to transition 3-credit courses to 4 credits. The thinking behind the Four-Credit Transition Initiative is that if faculty are able to focus on two 4-credit courses per semester instead of three 3-credit courses, they’ll have more time and energy to work on other things they enjoy, like research, course development and new initiatives. The question of how to transition a course, however, isn't always straightforward, according to Instructional Designer Autumm Caines. “A lot of people think adding that extra credit hour means adding more content — like, you could just add a couple extra readings,” Caines says. “But from a design perspective, that’s certainly not the only option or probably the best one. You could actually keep the amount of content the same, but go deeper. In some cases, an instructor might think about reducing content.”

So how does the idea of less content jibe with adding an extra credit hour? First, it helps to understand that when Caines talks about reducing content or increasing credit hours but keeping the amount of content the same, she’s not talking about making classes lighter-weight or less challenging. Rather, it’s about being conscious of the amount of material that students can realistically learn, given the time constraints of the course, and finding ways to use that time to produce learning outcomes that last. For example, let’s say an instructor has traditionally organized a 3-credit course around 12 core subjects. With an extra credit hour to play with, they could potentially cover 16 subjects. Or, Caines says, they could stick with 12 and add different kinds of learning activities that allow students more exploration in those essential areas. A unit that is usually covered by a textbook chapter and lecture could be developed further with an active assignment that asks students to apply what they’ve learned to a problem facing their own community, or engage in a group project, or write a personal reflection about how a key concept relates to something in their lives. Caines says the possibilities for these types of active learning assignments are basically unlimited.

The approach of going deeper with less material is gaining momentum in academia, in part, because emerging research suggests it enhances learning. Caines points to recent work from Bryan Dewsbury, an associate professor of biological sciences at Florida International University and current scholar in residence at ��-Dearborn, who’s an expert in inclusive teaching, a philosophy that emphasizes providing equal opportunities for students of all backgrounds to have successful learning experiences. In Dewsbury and his co-authors’ 2022 study, they followed students over two semesters of sequential introductory biology courses that used different instructional formats. During the first semester, three sections of the intro course used a traditional lecture format. A fourth mixed active learning and inclusive teaching with a reduction in content to make room for these more learning-centered pedagogies. In the second semester, students took either a lecture-based section or an active learning one. The result: Students who took the non-lecture sections both semesters had the highest grades in their 200-level biology courses the following year, with students from traditionally underrepresented identities showing some of the largest gains. Caines says outcomes like this suggest that active learning and inclusive teaching approaches help students hold on to the information and skills they’re learning because they’re able to spend more time with the content and experience it in different ways. It’s also a counterpoint to one of the most common arguments against active learning — namely, that it might be a good idea, but there simply isn’t time for it if students are going to get through all the material an instructor has deemed important. “But if students aren’t holding on to what they’ve learned beyond the course, that’s obviously not a great thing. What we’re seeing is more content doesn’t equal more learning,” Caines says.

Grace Helms-Kotre, a social work lecturer on both the Dearborn and Ann Arbor campuses, describes it as the difference between “making a point and driving a point home.” Over the past several years, she’s revised her Stress Management course multiple times, and each time it’s trended in the direction of less content. Initially, her course was organized around a traditional (thick) textbook, lots of assigned reading, quizzes and tests. But she noticed that the pace of the class and amount of material they were covering meant students were often just regurgitating the material on quizzes and tests rather than experiencing any kind of transformative learning. So she reduced the amount of required reading, shrunk the textbook, cut the number of core topics to just the essentials, and added some active assignments. For example, rather than assigning all the reading, sometimes she asks students to go find an article or video on the topic themselves and do a report back to her or the class. Often, she assigns a reflection piece that challenges students to engage with the material in a personal way. Helms-Kotre says the new approach has paid all kinds of dividends, including in richer class discussions and students reporting positive changes in their daily lives. Now, the most common feedback she gets about her course is that “it’s a class I’m really getting a lot out of.”

Incidentally, Caines finds student perceptions of active learning to be another interesting area of emerging research. She points to a Harvard study that found outcomes similar to Dewsbury’s recent research when it comes to learning outcomes. “But when students were asked how they felt they were doing, the students in the active learning and inclusive teaching sections felt like they weren’t doing as well, even though they were doing better. And the students in the lecture class felt like they were doing great, even though they weren’t doing as well.” Caines suspects this may have to do with the nature of active learning assignments. They’re usually less prescribed, less predictable, involve problem solving or innovating, and rarely reduce to right and wrong answers. As such, uncertainty and failure are par for the course. In some cases, trying and failing and trying again might lead to the deepest learning experience of all. But as we make our classes more active and inclusive, Caines says that’s a lesson we’ll have to help our students understand. “The way I explain it to students is that it’s sort of like going to the gym when you haven’t been working out for a while,” she says. “The sore muscles don’t feel good, but that’s an indication it’s working. So if you feel like you’re struggling with this stuff, that’s completely normal. It might even mean you’re on the right track.”

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Want to dive deeper into this topic? Check out Caines’ recent post on The Hub blog discussing why it’s important that we pay close attention to how much time students are spending on course-related tasks. Story by Lou Blouin.

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A (super busy) day in the life of public health senior Heather Wege

rudmehta — Sat, 05 Nov 2022 22:33:50 +0000

A (super busy) day in the life of public health senior Heather Wege rudmehta Sat, 11/05/2022 - 18:33

Heather Wege's Wednesday starts at 6:30 a.m. when her alarm goes off and ends at around 10:30 p.m. when there’s finally nothing else to do. In between, the 42-year-old public health senior is getting her two kids, Xander and Arianna, fed and dressed, then dropping them off at two different Oakland County schools. Then she’s off to ��-Dearborn for three consecutive classes, then home again to pick up the kids, feed them, love them, squeeze in some homework, and get them ready for bed.

Somehow, through it all, she maintains what is a noticeably cool exterior, which she told us is part disposition and part survival strategy: “I know if I let something derail me, then my whole day could unravel. So staying calm throughout a busy day is something I know I have to do.”

Recently, we tagged along with Wege for one of her marathon Wednesdays, as she closes in on fulfilling her 25-year dream of earning a college degree.

7:25 a.m. Breakfast + a decisive moment.

I graduated from high school early, and when I finished, I really wanted to go to college. Back then, my dream was to become a doctor. At the time, I was living with my grandparents, who didn't go to college, but they were successful entrepreneurs, and for them, that was a really great life. So when I started classes, I don’t think they really understood what college meant, and think I, in turn, didn't really know what all was going to be involved. So I ended up instead working in the travel industry for a long time, but the dream never left my mind all those years.

Then, I remember I had this moment; it was the October before Xander turned 1. I was looking at him wiggling his toes, thinking that I want this child to do all these things that are important to him. And I just thought, he needs the example that I didn't have. I couldn't tell him that he could do anything he wanted to do when I still had not made room in my life to do the thing I really wanted to do.

8:05 a.m. Dropping off the Super Kids at school.

I know Wednesday is going to be a tough day for me, so I actually start preparing mentally on Tuesday night. I go through the checklist of what I’m going to have to do so I don’t have that panicky moment where I realize I’ve forgotten something for the kids’ field trip or misplaced one of my textbooks. There is no such thing as routine: The day varies every time, because, you know — kids. Some days they wake up and they’re super cooperative. Or you can have a day like last week, where Arianna declares that she’s Wonder Woman and she’s changing her name and she doesn’t need to go to school anymore. Every morning, I wake up knowing that I’m going to face the unknown.

8:45 a.m. A quick moment to myself.

Some days, after I drop the kids off at school, I have time to come home for an hour so I can review my notes, finish up an outline, practice a presentation — whatever it is I need to do to prep for anything big that’s coming up in my day. It’s either that or I head right to campus and find a quiet spot to collect my thoughts. Because once my first class starts, it’s a back-to-back-to-back crunch of three classes in a row.

10:15 a.m. Doing the two-campus, three-class shuffle.

It would have been pretty amazing if all my Wednesday classes were in one spot. But unfortunately it didn't work out that way. So I developed this plan where I get to campus a little early, pray that I find a parking spot, park on the main campus and then take the shuttle over to Fairlane for my first class. Then, when that class gets out, I have 15 minutes to make it all the way back over to CASL for my next two classes.

But Professor Lacey has been really great about it and lets me quietly sneak out a few minutes early so I can make it. It’s even become the running joke in the class that I skip out early. Then I’m at CASL for the rest of my day. That’s when I’m glad I’ve parked there, because once I’ve finished my last class, I’m headed right back to school to pick up my kids.

11 a.m. A ‘mind-blowing’ class.

11 a.m. A ‘mind-blowing’ class. As I’ve moved through school, my path has changed a little bit. Originally, my major was biology because that’s what a lot of pre-health students do, and I sort of had this career goal of becoming a physician assistant or doing something in pharmacy. But then I discovered public health as a kind of alternate route, and it’s really worked out because the classes are way more in my wheelhouse.

Professor Lacey, for instance, teaches my medical sociology class, and he’s a person that’s always blowing my mind open. Like, one day he was telling me all about his research surrounding male victims of domestic violence, which is something you never really think about. And he has this incredible background: He’s from Jamaica, but lives in Canada, where, of course, there is universal healthcare. So he’s in this really unique position to teach about the sociological inequities in different healthcare systems, because he’s personally had all these different kinds of experiences.

2:30 p.m. An inspiring example.

One of the things I’ve noticed about being a non-traditional student is that I relate to my professors a lot differently than I did when I first was a college student 20-some years ago.

I take a lot of inspiration from Dr. Price, who teaches my Quantitative Research and Statistics class. Sometimes you have those moments where you’re like, ‘Why am I doing this?’ But to hear her story, how she started out as an elementary educator, and then did AmeriCorps, and then was working as an advocate in the judicial system in Louisiana, and then got her Ph.D. and now she’s here — it’s amazing to me. And I know she didn’t make all those decisions straight out of college, right? She had all of these transitions in her life, and she also has a family and is really involved with her kids and her research and her community. So I see her, and I see a path for me — and that it’s OK that it has not been a linear one.

6:30 p.m. Study group.

One of the cool things about both my kids being in school now is that most nights, after dinner, we all do our homework together. I mean, there are certain things I can do with them sitting there and certain things I can’t. But they’ll plug away at it for a surprisingly long time. I think part of the reason is they see that I have responsibilities too. They see that even when you’re older, it’s still important to learn and try to grow as a person. And they’ll always carry that with them because I went back to school when they were little.

7:15 p.m. Our moment of Zen.

Even on my busiest days, I do as much as I possibly can to make sure that we have time that’s completely focused on our family. It’s usually something really simple, like going to the park or exploring our front yard, sitting on the grass, looking at leaves or counting acorns. Those are my favorite little moments of the day. Sometimes, it’s just the hug, with a sweet little ‘I love you’ in my ear that comes out of nowhere. It’s the greatest comfort. It’s a reminder that I’m doing it right — at least right now.

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What does a typical day look like for non-traditional student Heather Wege? Anything but typical.

Practicing hope in the age of climate change

lblouin — Wed, 02 Nov 2022 16:17:57 +0000

Practicing hope in the age of climate change lblouin Wed, 11/02/2022 - 12:17

Assistant Professor of Health and Human Services Finn Bell has been an activist and organizer in “social justice-y” circles for 20 years. But environmental justice and climate issues, now two of his academic specialties, are both relatively recent additions to his repertoire. He describes the mingling of those topics into his life and academic work in terms that may sound familiar to many of us who’ve recently found ourselves thinking more seriously about climate change. Encounters with novels like Octavia Butler’s “Parable of the Sower” helped broaden his imagination about the connections between climate change, inequality and political power. Damaging flooding in 2013 in semi-arid Denver, where he’d recently moved from, made real the freak severe weather events that climate scientists were predicting. A talk at the Ann Arbor campus by environmental activist Winona LaDuke scared him a little. “Her message was basically that we are addicted to fossil fuels, and unless we all quit this addiction right this second, we’re all going to die,” Bell says. “And I was, like, whew, OK! And especially because, as a social worker and someone who’s worked in the area of addiction, you know that abstinence-only messages don’t work! So viewed through that lens, I guess we’re all going to die.”

For Bell, the seriousness of the subject doesn’t preclude a sense of humor. That’s partly because it’s his personality, but also because his particular approach to the topic of climate change is predominantly a human, sometimes unconventional, one. While most discussions of climate resilience focus on emerging technologies or big infrastructure projects, Bell is most interested in small communities of people modeling unique behaviors that could become useful in a world transformed by climate change. Some of his earliest work focused on an eco-justice center in the rural Midwest that was run by Catholic nuns. Bell spent months living at the center and working on the farm that sold its vegetables to local people via a CSA, a community supported agriculture model in which customers invest in the farm ahead of the growing season and get fresh produce as a return on that investment. He was impressed by many aspects of the nuns’ approach: their ability to transition from a social justice perspective focused on issues like prisoner advocacy and death penalty opposition, to a broader paradigm that incorporated environmentalism and agriculture; their “radical commitment” to each other, including their ability to care for their elders; and a level of frugality he’d never seen before. Regarding the latter, Bell counted himself as someone who’d “recently awakened” to environmental issues and was trying to be more conscious about his own use of resources. “I was in that mode where I was saving the Saran wrap from the coffee shop brownie to pick up my dog’s poop. That was nothing compared to the sisters,” Bell says. “If you dropped a seed while you were planting, there was a set of tweezers to pick up the seed. When my landline phone stopped working, there was a box of cords they’d saved and we went through the box to find a replacement.”

Bell preparing beds for planting at We the People Opportunity Farm in Ypsilanti.

Soon after, Bell got a chance to more directly blend his previous work on racial and economic justice with his newer interest in agriculture. For his doctoral dissertation work, he met with small growers in the Ypsilanti area, focusing specifically on the experiences of farmers and gardeners who were Black, indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) or lower-income. He talked with them about how they got interested in growing, how they learned to do it, the challenge of accessing land in an area facing intense development pressure, and how they were thinking about climate change. Their experiences varied, but Bell observed some common threads. First, growing food was really, really important to them. It provided economic and health benefits, as well as a sense of community and self-reliance. Moreover, Bell noted that the growers he spoke with were very outwardly focused. “It was the opposite of a hoarder or prepper mindset,” he says. “Their approach wasn’t individual, all against all. It was, how can I share what I’ve learned, how can I share the food I’ve grown, how can I uplift my community and make it stronger?”

Notably, this mindset isn’t something that prevails in all communities Bell has encountered. In fact, one of the big things that inspired Bell to study BIPOC and working class growers was a prior experience with a mostly white group that had a decidedly different approach to climate resilience. It was a complex group of people. He says they were generally on the left end of the political spectrum. They identified with many traditional social justice causes. And while putting them in the prepper camp wouldn’t be quite right, “apocalyptic” themes were common in their discussions. Bell noticed that, like the nuns and Ypsilanti farmers he knew, the group thought a lot about alternative ways of doing things for an era in which resources were potentially scarce. But, unlike the nuns and Ypsi growers, people in the group were not currently experiencing scarcity themselves and the discussion of who would benefit focused more exclusively on the members of that group. Talk of sharing ideas and skills they were developing to uplift the racially diverse local community wasn't front and center.

For Bell, one of the big takeaways from his work so far is the idea that adjusting to the economic, political and environmental transitions of the climate change era will take more than renewable energy and bigger seawalls. It’s going to take cultivating alternative social structures, new behaviors, traditions and ways of relating to each other that equip us to cope with a road ahead in which good outcomes aren’t predictable or guaranteed. When Bell is occupying this headspace, he often thinks of a quote — one he comically first encountered hanging in his mother’s bathroom — from dissident, playwright and Czechoslovakia’s last President Václav Havel. “It’s a long quote, so I’ll summarize, but he’s basically saying hope is the belief that what you’re doing matters,” Bell explains. “Hope is not optimism. It’s not this hope that everything will be fine, because then you don’t actually have to do anything about it. As ecophilosopher Joanna Macy says, hope is a practice, like gardening or Tai chi. It’s investing in what you want to see in the world. It’s figuring out how to live now in a way that creates the world you want to live in.”

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Story by Lou Blouin

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Health and Human Services Lecturer Ural Hill’s roots capture the complexity of the American story

rudmehta — Thu, 29 Sep 2022 19:05:18 +0000

Health and Human Services Lecturer Ural Hill’s roots capture the complexity of the American story rudmehta Thu, 09/29/2022 - 15:05

This article was originally published on February 25, 2019.

We already knew Ural Hill as a man of many interests and talents. Setting aside a fascinating backstory, his life today blends work as a minister, counselor and lecturer at ��-Dearborn, where he's known as one of the College of Education, Health, and Human Services’ go-to resources on addiction. But when we called him earlier this month to discuss doing a faculty profile, he surprised us with what he said was holding the firmest grip on his curiosity. He's currently working on a memoir that weaves together the lives of his African and American ancestors with themes central to the country’s history — including issues that have continuously challenged its core ideals. We chatted with Hill about what this deep dive into his roots has yielded so far, and what he thinks it says about our shared American story.

Can you start by telling us how this journey into your past began?

Well, I was drawn into the story at a very young age. In 1965, at 6 years old, my grandmother decided to take us down to South Carolina to meet her family. It was a memorable trip for a number of reasons. But I have a vivid memory of going to meet her brothers and sisters and other relatives and her turning to me and saying: “These are your people; they are who you come from.” It was a profound moment, even as a very young person: I remember it being the beginning of my understanding that there is a place you come from that stretches beyond the place you live.

As I got older, I started to learn more details, primarily through a history that had been preserved through an oral tradition. At family reunions, for example, we would listen to stories from my [great] Aunt Corrie, who was the first elder family historian on my mother’s side. And it’s there that many of us learned the origins of our family in South Carolina. Corrie’s grandmother was Rachel Stewart, who we can trace all the way back to Sierra Leone and her journey on a slave ship probably sometime in the 1830s or 1840s. And the four children that Rachel had — one of whom is my direct ancestor — were from the slave owner. So I learned pretty early on that I came from a family that had mixed ancestry.

That can, of course, be an intense discovery, because relationships between enslaved women and slave owners were almost always non-consensual. It’s also very thought provoking, though, because that history confounds our either/or ideas about race, right?

Absolutely. As we follow that side of my family’s story forward, you can see how that played out numerous times. For example, my Aunt Millie, who was among those South Carolina relatives I met as a kid, was listed as white on her birth certificate and passed for white as a young woman. In fact, when her niece used to visit Millie in South Carolina, she would make sure that in public she called her Miss Millie, not Aunt Millie, so she wouldn’t be discovered.

And my Aunt Corrie used to tell a story about working at the library, and my Uncle Heyward — who looked white — came in and took her to lunch. When she got back, one of her colleagues asked her who the white man was who had picked her up. And she told her he was her brother Heyward. Then, the woman asked Corrie what she thought about integration. And Aunt Corrie said, “We don’t think anything about integration. We have been integrated in my family for a long time: Some of us are white and some of us are black.” To me, that’s an incredible way of looking at race that was far ahead of its time.

Hill’s Aunt Corrie (bottom right, in white) with her brother Rev. Heyward W. Stewart (bottom left) and their siblings.

So this is all on your mom’s side of the family tree. What do you know about your dad’s side?

In some ways, it’s a similar history. My father had lighter skin and green eyes; when he was younger, he looked like Clark Gable. Through his family’s own oral tradition, he knew the ancestry was complex and included African, white and Native American roots. And he was aware, as on my mom’s side, of an ancestor who was a child of an enslaved woman and the slave owner. But in the past 10 years or so, a cousin of mine has helped the family fill in more details about that history, which she chronicled in a book. What she learned is pretty remarkable: Sometime in the early 1800s, an Amish man from Pennsylvania named John Mast decided to leave the church and move to North Carolina. He was a businessman and he saw owning slaves as an opportunity to make his fortune. It didn’t work out that way for him, but his son, Joseph, owned slaves. And later, Joseph’s son, Reuben, had a child with one of them — a woman from Ghana. Their son, Charley Mast, is my direct ancestor.

Hill’s parents, Ural Hill Sr. and Florence Manciel Hill

A family tree that includes Amish and African ancestry — that’s pretty unbelievable. What does having a history like that mean to you? And what are you taking away from this dive into your family’s past more generally?

Well, I think there are personal takeaways and then takeaways for all of us as Americans, which is one of the reasons I’m interested in writing this book. One of the things that intrigues me personally is that there is a continuity between some of my deepest values and those of some of my ancestors. On my mother’s side, I’ve learned we are a family of preachers and teachers. My Aunt Corrie was one of the first black women to earn a teacher’s certificate in the state of South Carolina. My mother worked for Detroit Public Schools. And here I am now carrying on the teaching tradition. Similarly, I felt a deep sense of spirituality from a very early age. And as I look back through our history, you see right away that this is a godly family — a Christian family. So you start to think about how the generations that came before — even people you never met — are still influencing your path.

In a larger sense, I’m reading my family’s story as a microcosm of the macrocosm of black history. For example, in the social sciences, we talk a lot about race as a social construct. But that idea suddenly becomes much less conceptual when you see how in my family, siblings could be either — or both — “white” or “black,” simply because of a genetic role of the dice that made some of them lighter and some of them darker. Clearly for Aunt Corrie and Uncle Heyward, that understanding shaped how they thought about race. And I wonder if that legacy — of understanding how much more mixed we are as Americans, and how much we have in common that we don’t acknowledge — can help us move past some of the things that have historically pulled us apart.

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After his mother passed away in 2014, Hill inherited the role of family historian — and the sense of responsibility that comes with it.

College of Education, Health, and Human Services Lecturer Ural Hill holds a portrait of his great-great-grandmother, Rachel Stewart, a woman from Sierra Leone who was sold into slavery in South Carolina in the mid-1800s.

'I will forever Go Blue!'

rudmehta — Mon, 25 Jul 2022 17:40:19 +0000

'I will forever Go Blue!' rudmehta Mon, 07/25/2022 - 13:40

This article was originally published on April 27, 2020.

LaNeisha Elayne Brown said she had a small BBQ on Sunday. But they — she and her 12-year-old son — were celebrating something big: Her graduation.

Brown said her son has been with her every step of her college journey: Doing his homework quietly in the back of the college classroom while she attended evening lectures and being her “study buddy” in the Mardigian Library on the weekends.

Brown says she decided to go back to school when her son was starting grade school — she was at a low-paying job and wanted to make a better life for them. She earned her bachelor’s from ��-Dearborn in 2017 and continued through earning her Master of Science in Health Information Technology on Sunday.

“My kid is kind of a big deal. I am amazed by his selflessness and resiliency,” says the College of Education, Health, and Human Services graduate who plans to work in data analytics. “Even just the basic necessities were a daunting task to fathom achieving on my own when he was little. This graduation means we are unstoppable. This day means stability for myself and, most importantly, for my son.”

Brown, along with nearly 1100 ��-Dearborn Class of Spring 2020 degree candidates, were honored virtually on Sunday, April 26. When the commencement ceremony was canceled due to the pandemic, the university community worked together to find a way to give students a place to celebrate.

Grads, parents, university leadership, alumni and others gathered on celebratinggrads.umdearborn.edu to give advice, share memories and to recognize the Class of Spring 2020.

College of Engineering and Computer Science graduate Aaisha Khidir donned a cap and gown in front of her decorated house. College of Business student Rosa Gonzalez’s family celebrated with a traditional taco dinner — Gonzalez said her mom is a great cook and it’s her favorite homemade dish. College of Arts, Sciences, & Letters graduate Owen Ekblad, who is going to graduate school for his Ph.D. in mathematics this fall, said he had a relaxing day at home with his grandparents. Ekblad’s grandma Maureen Jackson posted on social media: “Congratulations, Owen! it amazes me what you have accomplished so far. Can't wait for this COVID-19 to be over...Love you around the block and back.”

Chancellor Domenico Grasso’s message on Sunday to the new Wolverine alumni served to let them know that their hard work and perseverance is recognized. “Although we unfortunately cannot share this great moment in person, our entire ��-Dearborn community is proud of your accomplishments and celebrates with you in spirit. Today you become graduates of the University of Michigan-Dearborn. You join a worldwide Michigan alumni family of 600,000 strong. The world that the Class of 2020 now enters is not what was anticipated. It’s a challenging time, but is also one filled with opportunity.” Several members of university leadership shared messages of encouragement and congrats to the graduates.

Student commencement speaker Cecilia P. Olvera had words of inspiration for her Class of Spring 2020 too. Olvera, the first in her family to graduate college, gave advice she’s received from her grandmother and mother: “Be the best you can be” and “never stop shooting for the stars.” She also told the graduates that earning their ��-Dearborn degree is a step in that journey of becoming your best self. And that should be recognized.

“I chose this institution not only because of the prestigious Block M on the diploma that I have dreamt of since I was a little brown girl, but also because of the natural diversity of the student population...for all the sparkle that our differences offer the world, I also want to take a moment to address the shared experiences of the graduates,” says Olvera, a Master of Public Administration and Policy graduate. “We worked our tails off to get here. You deserve to be celebrated. All your long nights, missed events, financial hardships, and the variety of emotion that has accompanied you through it all, has led you to this pinnacle moment.”

Like Olvera, Brown — who said she and her son relaxed after their celebratory Sunday barbecue — thought about the Block M since she was a child too. But life circumstances, like caring for a sick parent and raising a child, provided other important lessons that temporarily took her in a different direction.

Brown said the road she’s traveled has been difficult at times. But, looking back, she’s exactly where she’s supposed to be.

“At one time I felt stuck, hopeless, lost and overwhelmed. But I want people to know that there is always hope, always a way. Education is important — and you are worth it. It’s not always easy, but I want anyone who reads this to know it is possible. You are capable of being one of the leaders and one of the best. I will forever Go Blue!”

Commencement

College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters

College of Business

College of Education, Health, and Human Services

Health and Human Services

College of Engineering and Computer Science

Off

Mon, 04/27/2020 - 05:00

Sunday was a big day for many in the ��-Dearborn community — nearly 1100 students graduated. Although there wasn’t a physical ceremony, the community rallied to recognize their achievement.

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'I will forever Go Blue!'

Rayan Khalil and Assistant Professor Van Hai Bui
Project: Assessment of solar energy generation towards net-zero energy buildings

Sarah Chaban and Associate Professor Lisa Martin
Project: Reproductive freedom on the ballot: How gender and demands for self-determination are driving electoral politics in the post-Roe era

Read about ��-Dearborn student Tepfirah Rushdan, former co-director of Keep Growing Detroit and the City of Detroit’s first director of urban agriculture.