EXPERT ADVISORY
Elizabeth Moje is the George Herbert Mead Collegiate Professor of Education and dean of the Marsal Family School of Education at the University of Michigan. Her research examines young people’s culture, identity and literacy learning both in and out of school, with a particular focus on youth in Detroit.
Moje’s work documents how adolescents learn and use literacy in their communities, popular cultural groups and online spaces. She also explores how school disciplines function as cultural settings with their own norms, practices and expectations.
Moje joins the Michigan Minds podcast to discuss how educators can better understand students’ diverse cultural and literacy practices. She explains how teachers can serve as cultural brokers, connecting the knowledge and strengths young people bring to the classroom with academic learning.
Transcript
Juan Ochoa
Welcome to the Michigan Minds Podcast, where we explore the wealth of knowledge from faculty experts at the University of Michigan.
I am Juan Ochoa, international public relations representative for the Michigan News office. I’m pleased to welcome Dean Elizabeth Moje, the George Herbert Mead Collegiate Professor of Education and Dean of the Marsal Family School of Education at the University of Michigan.
Dean Moje’s research examines young people’s culture, identity and literacy learning both in and out of school, with a particular focus on youth in Detroit. Her work documents how adolescents learn and use literacy in communities, popular cultural groups and online spaces, helping educators understand that school disciplines are like cultural settings with their own norms. Her insights guide teachers in becoming cultural brokers who can connect students’ diverse assets to academic learning.
Juan Ochoa
Welcome, Dean. Moje is nice to have you with us today.
Dean Moje
Well, thanks for having me. It’s wonderful to be here.
Juan Ochoa
I want to dive into K-12. School is about to start. Depending on when listeners are tuning in. What are some of the major issues K-12 is facing right now?
Dean Moje
Where do I begin? This is the $64,000 question. What are the major issues? We could start with the fact that even your reference was to K through 12. And what happens before K matters a lot to how children develop. Some children have a lot of opportunities for learning formal learning before they come to school. And we might call that preschool, but there may be other variations on that.
Dean Moje
Others don’t have those opportunities, and yet all the children are going to be expected to do the same kinds of things as they progress throughout the grades. And so we know that universal preschool education is an essential element of helping all children, really, you know, hit the ground running, if you will. Some might say that is putting too much focus on formal education.
Dean Moje
That’s another kind of issue that’s facing K-12 or in this case, pre K-12 education that we’re demanding too much of children. Maybe we should actually not focus as much on those early years and let children be children. But the fact is that we know children come to school with very different sets of resources and skills already developed and underdeveloped, and yet they’re compared throughout their school years, and teachers have to teach all of the children.
Dean Moje
And that means that there’s more diversity in the skill sets children walk in with, and more challenge to meeting all of the children’s needs. So I mentioned teachers. That’s a second major issue facing pre-K 12 education today. We don’t have enough teachers. We don’t have enough well-prepared teachers in our nation’s schools. This is not just a Michigan problem.
Dean Moje
This is a problem throughout the country and in fact, throughout the world. I work with a lot of different teacher educators and researchers, education researchers all over the world, and everyone is facing teacher shortages and in particular, shortages of well-prepared teachers, teachers who are ready to support the learning needs of all children. And this is critical because we want children to learn for a future we don’t even completely understand ourselves.
Dean Moje
We have many changes facing the world, and those changes come into education. And yet we don’t have enough well-prepared teachers. I don’t know if you know this, but the single most important ingredient, as demonstrated through numerous research studies in a child’s learning life, is a well-prepared teacher. Not just a warm body in a classroom, but a well-prepared teacher.
Dean Moje
So that’s a second major issue. A third, if you’ll indulge me, is school funding. We talk a lot about school funding, but the real crux of the matter is inequitable school funding. Some schools, frankly, have more money to work with than other schools. It can look like the funds are distributed equally, but the first thing we should realize is that not everyone has the same needs.
Dean Moje
And so we need school funding to be distributed equitably, not just equally. But second, we know that some communities can raise additional resources to add to the funding distributed by the state, and that produces inequities in learning. It produces unequal learning opportunities, even though it looks like the funding is distributed equally. And I’ll just add one thing. Some economists will say that funding doesn’t matter.
Dean Moje
More money doesn’t make a difference, but that really doesn’t make a lot of sense. Just rationally speaking, if more money doesn’t make a difference, then why do independent schools charge so much more money than our public schools distribute on a per pupil allocation? It if if it’s not really about money, then parents who choose to send their children to independent schools should be asking the question why are we paying so much?
Juan Ochoa
I want to touch back on what you said, that pre-K is also important. Does that mean parents also need to be educated on certain things?
Dean Moje
Absolutely. Parents need to be educated on certain things. For one thing, parents can be educated on things that are changing in our world. And you know, we know another hot topic. If I could just go on for hours about all the major issues facing education. Another hot topic would be changes in access to information and changes in access to unmediated information, usually available through social media platforms.
Dean Moje
Children have a lot more opportunity to connect with things in the world, and that isn’t always managed in ways that support children’s healthy development. That would be one thing parents could learn a lot more about, but it’s also important to think about the fact that if we do have some issues facing our K-12 schools and those aren’t new, we probably have parents who also weren’t provided opportunity to have a strong education.
Dean Moje
And so we sometimes talk about intergenerational miseducation. So we have parents who weren’t highly educated, and they’re raising children who may not have access to the best education. And that can become a kind of intergenerational or, you know, cycle of miseducation.
Juan Ochoa
And do you correlate that to possibly the reason why some students are lacking in math and reading in schools or even being absent?
Dean Moje
So those are two. I’m glad you put those two together, because I’m going to talk about chronic absenteeism. I’ll come back to that. Yes, absolutely. If if children don’t have access to all the resources that education brings, they will have a harder time learning. I could give many different examples of what that might look like. Children have opportunities in school, but they also have all kinds of opportunities outside of school.
Dean Moje
And we think of children spending an enormous amount of time in school, but they leave school. Let’s let’s call it 3:00 every day. There’s still a lot of the day left, even if they go to bed early, you know, even there I know. Well, that’s the other question. Do you know our children staying up too late? But that’s a different conversation.
Dean Moje
But let’s say they go to bed at 9:00. 8:00. That’s a long time that, you know, they’re still learning. It’s not as if children just there shut off their brains when they walk out of a school classroom. There are many different kinds of things they’re learning, and those could be really great. Or they could be neutral or they could be actually harmful.
Dean Moje
So yes, if you have access to resources, if your parents are educated and have resources, financial resources to be able to take you to museums, you know, go buy books, go on trips, right? Go all over the world, that’s a different kind of education. And don’t forget summer. I mean, we could talk about whether a better approach would be to extend the school year, have a more balanced calendar.
Dean Moje
That’s a different conversation related, but different. Now, you mentioned absenteeism. You know, one of the things that we’re worrying about a lot in our state are are reading scores. We’re worried about math as well. Reading tends to get the greatest focus at least these days. And there are a lot of things being done to try to mitigate some of the losses that we’ve seen in children’s reading skill, as measured by standardized tests.
Dean Moje
But one thing that we have to remember is, no matter what we do in terms of curriculum, no matter what we do in terms of teacher education and development, which I strongly support doing, we still have to face the fact that if children aren’t in school and that’s where they’re formally taught reading and particularly math, people don’t do a lot of math at home, then they’re going to struggle to make the kinds of skill gains that we want to see.
Juan Ochoa
You also touched a little bit on well-prepared teachers. I hear teacher pay has been down over the last decade when adjusted to inflation. Well, more than half say they plan to leave the profession earlier than originally intended, with teacher pay flat, burnout high and political pressures growing, how can districts attract and keep good teachers?
Dean Moje
This is a great question. Teacher recruitment and retention are, you know, the things that keep me up at night. That question of how to solve this. I want to offer one additional piece of information before I turn to that. Teachers are the only profession, the only even workforce who haven’t or who hasn’t. Workforce hasn’t made up losses experienced in the recession of 2007 2008.
Dean Moje
So not only is it flat, it actually is really far down. It’s really low. Teacher pay has not kept up with inflation, and it has not even kept up with other bounceback that other professions have experienced. So this is an enormous problem. There are other things that have been lost or were lost at that time as well. Pensions were cut, you know, opportunities to build a kind of healthy life, to know that when done with 30 or 40 years of service, I will have a way to sustain my life.
Dean Moje
Right. That’s a lot of that is gone for teachers. The classroom is also a much different place from the past. Some of this is due to things like access to social media on the part of children. Some of it is due to screen time. We are hearing about the state banning cell phones. All of these things contribute to the challenges that teachers are facing in the classroom.
Dean Moje
Certainly our experience with the pandemic didn’t help matters. So there are enormous pressures on teachers, and the pay has not even kept up with a classroom prior to all of those pressures developing. Right. So this is this is a very serious issue. And if we don’t figure out teacher compensation and don’t really send teachers the message that we value them, we value them as essential elements of our society.
Dean Moje
We’re putting our children’s lives in their hands. Then we are not going to crack the teacher recruitment and retention nut. Now, what are we doing at the Marcell Family School of Education at the University of Michigan? We have a number of strategies that we have enacted, and a lot of these, you know, we’re there. We’re doing things that are within the locus of our control.
Dean Moje
Obviously, when I can I talk to people about teacher compensation, that’s something that I can try to have an impact on, but I can’t control it. Right. But what I can control is the one thing that teachers really haven’t gotten is more education and more development. So pay has gone down, but so has training and development and support.
Dean Moje
So what we’re trying to do is figure out how we can better support developing teachers, and then keep them in classrooms for the first time ever, the University of Michigan Marcel Family School of Education will be admitting first year students directly into our school so their education as teachers can begin from the first day of their university experience.
Dean Moje
This is for undergraduates. We also have a master’s program for people who are changing professions. So a master’s plus certification, that four year degree program is one of the first in the country to really try to devote for years of education. And if you think about other professions, they don’t train people in two years and say go have at it.
Dean Moje
They actually give much more time to training. In addition, we have a partnership in Detroit with Detroit Public Schools in which we have developed a teaching school. So we work on all parts of the school curriculum development, all kinds of research and evaluation to support, you know, the best teaching practices possible. But we also educate young teachers there.
Dean Moje
And so they will do their professional program, pre-professional program with us. They do internships, they do student teaching like every other grad teacher. And then when they graduate, they place for residency at the school at Mary Grove in Detroit. And that residency is at no cost to them. In fact, they are paid public school teachers in the Detroit public schools there, members of the Detroit Federation of Teachers.
Dean Moje
We continue to support them for those three years. And then they leave residency. And the idea is that they go to other Detroit public schools. The good news about this is that these young teachers are staying in the profession. So 85% of our residents have stayed in education, 90% two years ago, stayed in Detroit public schools, and 100% stayed in the Detroit metro area.
Dean Moje
So that kind of work is meant to provide them the sense of efficacy in those first three years that will allow them to be successful and stay in the profession. It doesn’t solve the salary issue, but which would you rather have? A low salary and a feeling of not being effective, or a low salary and really high sense of efficacy knowing that you are doing something for children?
Juan Ochoa
What’s driving the reason for these teachers to stay in Detroit as opposed to leaving?
Dean Moje
Well, what we know from the research is if you don’t feel a sense of efficacy in your first three years, you’re more likely to leave than if you do feel it right. So that was our first goal, was help these teachers feel like they can do the work and do it well. Nobody wants to be doing a job that they deeply care about, right?
Dean Moje
Teachers don’t go into this typically for the money, so they don’t want to do a job and then feel like they can’t even do it well. So they need to feel like they’re doing it well. And then what they need to see is I can make a difference. Teaching is the best way to make a difference in the world.
Dean Moje
We talk about a teacher having infinite impact because we teach children. They teach other children, they teach their own children. And it goes on and on and on. Right? So what greater job could you possibly have? And if you feel like you’re doing it well, it might be okay to do it on a less than reasonable salary. I don’t want to sound like I’m advocating for teachers not to be paid well, but at least if they’re not going to be paid well, at least help them be feel successful at it.
Dean Moje
The other cool thing about this work is we’re finding that the veteran teachers who are also in the school, who we enlist as what we call attendings, attending teachers, just like attending physicians, they’re staying. They tell us that I’m staying because of this model. I’m staying because I have a chance to educate future educators. So our first goal is we’re trying to raise the quality of the profession and the sense of value associated with it, and where I can.
Dean Moje
I work on issues around compensation. We also pay them in the summer to do professional development and curriculum development. So it does augment their salaries. That’s separate from their teacher salary.
Juan Ochoa
So when it comes to their training, how is it different now than, let’s say, ten years ago where AI didn’t exist? What’s going on there?
Dean Moje
AI the the gorilla in the room. Right. So artificial intelligence is an advancement that can be used in really productive and positive ways, and it can be terribly used as well. So the work we’re doing at Marcel is to try to understand what it means to use AI in classrooms, to really try to study this, to try to think about the different kinds of uses of that tool to help people remember that it is a tool, and to really highlight the dimensions of teaching and learning that can never be completely captured using artificial intelligence.
Dean Moje
So just this morning, I was talking with a collaborator in Australia. We’re working on a paper on generative AI in the uses of AI and using chat bots to engage with, with children. And we talked a lot about the difference between information and knowledge, even, and wisdom, and what a human can bring to an engagement. An educational experience is wisdom.
Dean Moje
A chat bot can’t bring that wisdom in the same way. And so we’re really thinking about the relational dimensions of teaching and learning and how to emphasize those and use the tool for what it is. It’s a tool now, something that you didn’t ask about, but does rely at some level on. Artificial intelligence is extended reality. Extended reality tools have enormous possibility in education, and I’m really excited about those.
Dean Moje
And so that’s a way that you can think about using artificial intelligence to advance children’s understanding. Imagine if you could get inside a cell. So I was a biology teacher, history teacher, political science teacher. These were my majors in in college. If if I had an artificial intelligence based extended reality tool that could have taken my 10th graders inside a cell like Miss Frizzle and the Magic School Bus and actually help them experience the different parts of a cell instead of having to use acetate slides that, you know, mimicked different parts of a cell in comparison to a city.
Dean Moje
If I could have had that, I think my students would have had a far different understanding. Even better. Teaching history. Teaching history is really hard because it’s such an abstraction. But history is just, you know, stories, accounts of people’s lives. Kids should love this. They love talking about things people are doing in the present. What if you could take them back in time?
Dean Moje
What if you could have a holodeck Star Trek reference there and actually have kids experience the Continental Congress or, you know, the debates as they worked through crafting the Constitution, really get inside the Bill of rights and help them think about why those things were developed at that time and what they meant in context. How exciting would that be?
Dean Moje
Right. So I think what we have to do in education is really emphasize these are the possibilities. They must must be used with appropriate guardrails. We’re not ever going to advocate for children sitting in cafeterias in front of computer terminals, learning without any kind of human engagement. That’s what we’re trying to work on in terms of AI. We’re doing research on it, and then we’re teaching teachers how to make the best use of the tools they have in front of them.
Juan Ochoa
With kids having access to cell phones, what do you suggest teachers or school districts do in terms of possibly cheating with AI? Should they have stricter policies?
Dean Moje
You know, I, I never like to go first to let’s make new rules and and try to really tamp down on something. I like to think about the question of if you can cheat on my assignment, is it a good assignment? Should I come up with something that is more engaged, that requires you to demonstrate in front of me in real time?
Dean Moje
You’re learning, and perhaps use AI as a tool to help you build an understanding of something, and then be able to show me what that understanding looks like. At our school in Detroit, in partnership with Detroit Public Schools, we do project and place based learning, so our students do things like the first year the building was being renovated and our brilliant ninth grade human centered design and engineering teacher had the the kids designed the classrooms they wanted for 10th grade and then present them to the architects and the construction managers.
Dean Moje
Get feedback, iterate on those designs. You can’t use AI to cheat on that. You can use AI to help you think about oh, load bearing wall. What would that mean? How can I can’t take that wall out? What could I do differently? But ultimately, AI doesn’t know what those ninth graders want for their classrooms. So we have to be giving students the kinds of projects, the kinds of work that actually matters in the world, and then they’re not going to be able to cheat on it.
Dean Moje
Right? If it’s write a five paragraph essay about ducks, I don’t know why I came up with that. Then I can use AI to do that, and it will probably be pretty good.
Juan Ochoa
Yeah. When I think back to my days in school, I feel like we should have had a type of teaching that it would be useful for the future, like these kids where they were talking about where you were talking about a load bearing walls. Like, I think that would have been a lot more fun than trying to just remember something and regurgitate it later.
Dean Moje
Well, and you know what? You’re right, because the research shows that project and place based, we talk about place based that can say more about what that means. That kind of experience actually is not only enriching, it’s motivating. And students do achieve higher results. We have a number of studies out of Michigan, Marcel, that show that students, even on standardized tests, those achievements are showing up.
Dean Moje
Having done project based science, we we were part of a group. I was part of this group because I study literacy learning in the disciplines where, you know, kids were doing projects like how, how could how can good friends make you sick? And it was an epidemiologist project, right. What’s the quality of the water in the rivers in my town?
Dean Moje
That’s not something you can really cheat on. You have to go do water samples. You can use AI to help you analyze the samples, like that’s the appropriate use of the tool.
Juan Ochoa
As Dean, you’re preparing the next generation of teachers, and you kind of touched on what’s happening at Mary Grove. But what do you think high schools throughout the country should equip students to do when they graduate?
Dean Moje
First of all, I don’t think it just starts at high school. So I think graduation, we have to be thinking about graduation when we’re sending our children, when they’re born, the moment they come out of the womb, we should be thinking about their futures and we should be preparing them for those futures. So I would say, and that’s why we have our our program is prenatal through 12th grade.
Dean Moje
That’s why we start even before children come out of the womb, if you will. It’s we’re working with parents. They’re not the, not the, you know, the fetus. But but what I think we should be preparing children to do is actually be thinkers and learners and doers in the future. My good friend Lou Glaser, who is the leader of Michigan Future Incorporated, he talks about we should be teaching people how to learn, and I couldn’t agree more.
Dean Moje
We should be teaching people how to be thinkers, learners and doers. And if we’re teaching all kids that they will self-select into their various jobs. There’s a big claim right now that a four year degree doesn’t add value. That is actually the evidence is very clear that that’s actually completely incorrect, that earnings and earning potential are much higher for people with four year degrees.
Dean Moje
However, not everyone needs to have a four year degree, right? What they need is the choice. They need to be able to choose the opportunity they want to pursue. That’s what I want for all children thinkers, learners, doers because we don’t know what people are going to need to know in the future. So cramming a bunch of information down kids throats or into their heads has never been good teaching.
Dean Moje
But it’s really not good teaching now because we don’t, you know, I have my iPad in front of me. You could ask me a question, and I could type in the question and have the information right in front of me. It’s what we do with that information that matters. So thinkers, learners, doers.
Juan Ochoa
One last question. What do you want our listeners to take away from this conversation?
Dean Moje
My last words would be. I hope that everyone understands how important education is, a hope that they will really support our teachers being compensated in the way they should be. I hope they’ll remember that our teachers are holding children’s lives in their hands, and they’re holding the future in their hands, and we need to support them in being the best they can be.
Dean Moje
That’s by providing compensation, by providing training and development, and finally by providing the professional respect that they’re due. We don’t talk about teachers very well or kindly in this nation. We need to change that.
Juan Ochoa
Thank you for listening to this episode of Michigan Minds, produced by Michigan News, a division of the university’s office of the Vice President for communications.
With kids having access to cell phones, what do you suggest teachers or school districts do in terms of possibly cheating with AI? Should they have stricter policies?
I never like to start by making new rules and trying to tamp down something. I like to ask: If you can cheat on my assignment, is it a good assignment? Should I come up with something more engaging that requires you to demonstrate your learning in front of me in real time?
At our school in Detroit, in partnership with Detroit Public Schools, we do project- and place-based learning. During the first year, the building was being renovated, and our brilliant ninth grade human-centered design and engineering teacher had the students design the classrooms they wanted for 10th grade. They then presented their designs to the architects and construction managers, received feedback and revised their designs.
You can’t use AI to cheat on that. You can use AI to help you think: “Oh, that’s a load-bearing wall. I can’t take that wall out. What could I do differently?” But ultimately, AI doesn’t know what those ninth graders want for their classrooms. We have to give students projects—the kinds of work that actually matter in the world—and then they’re not going to be able to cheat.
If the assignment is to write a five-paragraph essay about ducks, then I can use AI to do that, and it will probably be pretty good.
Source: https://news.umich.edu/michigan-minds-podcast-preparing-teachers-and-students-for-the-future/