Innovator Vol. 36 No. 1 - Winter 06: The M Difference

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The University’s historic and pervasive passion for nurturing intellectual cross-fertilization sets it apart from its peers. It bespeaks an understanding that the work of traditional disciplines, however distinguished, does not always correspond neatly with the societal issues that students and faculty are expected to address. It embodies a rare institutional flexibility in responding to the needs those students express.

The Combined Program in Education and Psychology

Professor Tabbye Chavous and Professor Kevin Miller, a new faculty member, are co-chairs of the Combined Program in Education and Psychology. Miller argues that several features of the University of Michigan make it a place uniquely suited for interdisciplinary programs. “One reason so many of these programs have thrived here is that the University of Michigan has strong graduate programs in a variety of fields. In addition to having one of the top Schools of Education, we have some of the world’s best programs in Psychology, English, Business, and Medicine. We also have a tradition of faculty members who are jointly appointed in these different departments. In other universities, it is often the case that students need to build the bridges between different programs, which leads to problems of continuity and institutional support. Here there is a tradition of support for interdisciplinary education which is both long-term and deep, and the success of the combined programs reflects that.”

This commitment is abundantly present in the School of Education, where four combined degree programs—two of them more than half a century old—are flourishing, and another is “under construction.”

The Joint PhD Program in English and Education (JPEE) was initiated in the 1930s. The Combined Program in Education and Psychology (CPEP), which also leads to the PhD, will celebrate its 50th anniversary next year. Students in the Higher Education and Public Policy Program, a five-year-old partnership with the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, can earn master’s degrees in both higher education and public policy. A dual degree joint program with the Ross School of Business that offers master’s degrees in education as well as business administration is heading into its second year, and a program in conjunction with the Medical School is scheduled for a fall 2006 rollout.

With one exception, all are unique to this University and this School of Education: there is also an MA/MBA program at Stanford.

Roger Goddard’s comments about the students in Michigan’s MA/MBA program, for which he is the School of Education faculty sponsor, also describe those enrolled in the others. “They have noble goals,” he says. “They want to make the world a better place, and they see this as an opportunity to bring a unique set of skills to bear on educational problems.”

“Interdisciplinarity is a way of thinking as well as a way of acting,” says School of Education Associate Professor Lesley Rex, co-chair of JPEE. “In that sense, we are emblematic of the mission of the university, which is to expand intellectual knowledge by thinking outside the disciplinary box. The evidence of the program’s success is not just its longevity and the continued interest we have from applicants, but also the quality of the work that is produced by our graduates.”

But does a formal interdisciplinary program really offer a significant advantage over enrolling in one school and taking classes in another? Is creating one worth the trouble?

Anne Gere, professor of education and of English language and literature, is a product of the program she now co-chairs with Rex. She answers the question from her own experience.

“I was a high school English teacher and had taught for several years,” she says. “I had a master’s degree already and I knew I had lots of questions that had come about as a result of my teaching, particularly about teaching writing. I started looking around to find the places where I could get those questions answered, and most of what I found were PhD programs in literature which wouldn’t have addressed my questions, or PhD programs in education which were much more concerned about a more generic pedagogy but not particularly grounded in English. When I found this joint program, I felt it was precisely designed for me. When I ask students what appealed to them about it, they will say, almost to a person, some version of what I just said.”

Now for a closer look at each of these programs.

Combined Program in Education and Psychology

No entity survives for half a century without adapting. Initially designed for training psychologists to work in school systems, CPEP eventually became more research-oriented, notably in the field of motivation. But death and retirement have cost the program several of its core faculty in that area, and new directions—under the aegis of a new chair—beckon.

Kevin Miller, CPEP co-chair, comments on the special strengths of the program. “We have been known as the leading center for research on motivation in schools, and we are trying to find ways of maintaining that expertise while moving in new directions,” he says. “We are in the process of hiring faculty in the area of motivation and social processes in education, but the history of CPEP shows that programs evolve as the interests of students and faculty change over time. There’s a new emphasis on more cognitive issues, understanding what children learn in school and how we can prepare teachers to be able to teach them effectively.”

“The program right now is in a very pivotal place of deciding its future direction,” says Jacquelynne Eccles, professor of both psychology and education, who has served several terms as CPEP’s chair. “The program will definitely broaden out.”

In addition to cognition, Miller sees a couple of other promising paths. “Michigan is very strong in cultural and cross-cultural psychology, and we’re trying to bring some of that expertise into CPEP,” he says. “Also, I think that down the road neuroscience will be an important area for our program. Getting from here to there is going to be an interesting challenge, but clearly this is a program that’s very vital and continuing to evolve.”

Dual Degree in Education and Business

“This program recognizes there are ways the two schools can work together for the improvement of education,” says Associate Professor Roger Goddard. “It also serves a need for MBA students who want to work in the nonprofit sector, who want to work in schools in particular, and who have an interest in learning about schools, the environments in which they operate, and the ways they are organized.”

The dual degree opportunity came about in response to a proposal by an informal group of business students with education backgrounds who had an interest in teaching and learning. One of them was Marc Lavine, who was part of a three-student pilot program that predated the approval of the official program. He had been a classroom teacher, then started working in the nonprofit sector with young people in the areas of job training and economic development.

“I was trying to market and promote a program while knowing there was a formal body of knowledge on how to do it that I should access to be more effective,” he says. “I also thought that if I were involving young people in a business to teach them skills, it would be helpful to get more formal business training.”

In 2003, Levine and fellow students Alison Shriberg and Elizabeth Tilden persuaded the Educational Administration faculty to try out a joint MA/MBA program. There seems to have been a considerable reservoir of demand for this particular interdisciplinary blend. According to Goddard, more than 25% of this year’s incoming educational administration and policy master’s students will be in this dual degree program.

Joint Program in English and Education

"One of the things that makes our program particularly unique is that it brings together a discipline in the humanities and a discipline in the social sciences," says Professor Anne Gere. "What you get as a result of that particular combination is an unusually rich mixture, both conceptually and methodologically."

"It’s designed for people who are ready to make a career change," adds Gere. "They go from being a high school English teacher, say, to becoming a university professor of English or education. Or they go from someone who has been teaching writing, often as a lecturer or adjunct, to being someone who is a tenure-track professor. The preparation that students get here combines the humanistic tradition of rhetoric with the educational tradition of literacy studies, so these people are unusually well prepared."

Professor Lesley Rex cites a recently completed dissertation by Victoria Haviland, now a research associate, as an example of how the program’s students put that preparation at society’s service.

"She was interested in studying why it was so difficult for white female teachers, especially those beginning their professional lives, to talk with their students about issues of race and multiculturalism," Rex says. "Coming from her own experience as a white female teacher who had had that kind of difficulty, she discovered there wasn’t anything in the literature that would be helpful for beginning teachers. She set up her own study and found there were ways in which these teachers were talking to students that undermined having in-depth and relevant and potentially transforming discussions about race and multiculturalism. It contributes significantly to understanding why we’re having such a difficult time improving the study of multicultural issues in the classroom in this country."

"The joint program really allowed me to follow my own path in terms of designing a program that worked for me," says Haviland. "I was able to make choices much more freely among a range of courses within English and Education, and the humanities focus that I got through the English part led me to take anthropology classes and other kinds of research classes that are the exact same things that I ended up using in my dissertation."

HIGHER EDUCATION AND PUBLIC POLICY

“If you’re not in there being your own advocate and making your voice heard, you can get overlooked, and I think that happened to public education for a while,” says Beth Soboleski, assistant director of student and academic services at the Ford School. “School systems got a little bit left behind.”

Graduates of the Higher Education and Public Policy program are well equipped to help them catch up. “The higher education degree is going to give you credibility in the college and university world,” she says, “but the public policy degree opens up the doors of governmental agencies or nonprofits that deal with or impact education policy.”

“By marrying these two things, what you have is an individual who has a really unique set of tools,” says Stephen DesJardins, SOE Associate Professor and faculty advisor for the program. “They know the higher education literature and they have the analytical tools to apply that knowledge in the real world toward attempting to solve policy problems related to post-secondary and higher education.”

And they tend to go into government service where these sets of skills are in high demand.. “For instance,” DesJardins notes, “the Government Accounting Office called not very long ago and said, ‘We understand you have this dual degree program. That’s great! Those are the kinds of people we’re looking for.’ ”

DUAL DEGREE IN HIGHER EDUCATION AND MEDICINE

When Emory Collins and Caren Stalburg, two young faculty members in the Medical School, decided to pursue master’s degrees in higher education, they found that there was little organized overlap with their medical education. Now a formal dual degree program for medical students is “under construction.”

“It’s starting with the faculty,” says Larry D. Gruppen, chair of the Medical School’s Department of Medical Education. “The next step will be to make this available to physicians in training.”

“The Medical School had identified a need for those who wanted to turn to faculty roles or be administrators in colleges of medicine,” says Patricia King, professor of education and director of the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education. “For the former group, there was an interest in issues of pedagogy, instruction, and instructional design and also in understanding the institution of higher education and how it operates. For the latter, there was an interest in learning how universities are organized, their governing structures, and issues of leadership in academic contexts.”

“Almost all the teachers in any professional school are there because of their content expertise, not because they’re trained as educators,” says Gruppen, “and that is becoming recognized nationally as something of a deficiency. For us, what was attractive was the fact that at Michigan we have a top-ranked School of Education and a top-ranked Medical School, so the opportunity to put those two together was very attractive.”

Two big challenges in creating a program like this have already been surmounted, according to King. “There’s a lot of interest on the part of both schools,” she says, “and the higher ed curriculum was readily adaptable to the system that we were envisioning,” allowing a student to concurrently enroll in medicine and education. “It’s really pretty exciting,” she says, “and may expand to serve the professional needs of students in other health disciplines.”