Dear SEMIS Coalition Members,
If you’ve been tuning into education news in Michigan lately, you’ve probably heard a lot about literacy. For several years, there has been coverage of falling literacy scores: Michigan’s reading proficiency rates (as measured by the M-STEP) are at their lowest for third graders since the test began being administered and, nationally, Michigan ranks 44th for reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. In the past few months, we’ve also heard more and more about proposed statewide solutions: the Governor’s proposed budget includes big investments in literacy, including $50 million for teacher training in the science of reading and additional dollars for districts to purchase an evidence-based reading curriculum from a state-vetted list. These stories reflect real challenges in students’ access to the tools they need to learn to read and write, but they are also a part of a broader, and much longer conversation about the role of literacy in community, democracy, and liberation.
While SEMIS is not a solely literacy-focused coalition, we are intentionally making space in this year’s blog to engage on place-based education’s role in broader conversations – like literacy, AI, community resilience and others – across our communities and how educators and young people not only respond to, but shape change through what they learn, and what they do with that learning. This month, I had the opportunity to talk with Jeff Austin and Teddy Robinson-Jones – two leaders in both literacy and place-based learning in the SEMIS Coalition – to ask: what does place-based education have to contribute to the broader conversation about literacy? How can place-based learning support literacy, and the other way around?
Jeff Austin has been a literacy and 3P (problem-, project-, and place-based learning) consultant with Wayne RESA for the past four years. Prior to this role, Jeff spent 12 years as an English Language Arts (ELA) and Social Studies teacher in Ann Arbor Public Schools, where he also helped launch a student-driven writing center. His experience co-creating that writing center with students gave him a unique lens on the role education, and specifically literacy, play in creating just and ethical communities that still shapes his work today. “Students had come to me asking what does a community-, civically-, and place-engaged writing center look like? I really felt strongly that before we launched into any sort of community center or place-centered activity, we needed some grounding. There’s a way to do this work that is not responsive and not responsible.”
That ability for place-based education to help students’ learn to be ethical, responsive, and responsible is just one of the connections Jeff sees between literacy and place-based learning. Another is the idea of disciplinary literacy. At its most basic, disciplinary literacy refers to the specialized literacy practices of a discipline (such as math or science) and the different ways that those disciplines engage with and produce texts. At a deeper level, though, disciplinary literacy seeks to provide answers to the question ‘why do we need to learn how to read?’
“There is a massive crisis of purpose in education,” Jeff reflects. “Kids are asking huge existential questions right now about what they are learning and why. And you better have good answers. ‘You’re going to need this someday’ isn’t working for kids.”
In 2019, the General Education Leadership Network (GELN) published a guide on instructional practices for disciplinary literacy for the secondary classroom, emphasizing the need to ‘establish compelling reasons for writing and communicating’, ‘expose students to diverse and abundant texts’, and ‘create opportunities for students to enact literate identities connected to their learning by attending to issues of equity, power, and justice’, among others.
“There is a lot of focus on literacy as a technical skill,” Jeff continues. “You need decoding to move forward but if I can’t read my community and I can’t read the world and I don’t understand how to pair my in-school learning with my out of school learning, then what is the decoding in service of? Shouldn’t reading be in service of not only meaning making but also in service of making a better future? Taking informed civic action? The way literacy is being viewed is reductive and limiting. Literacy is not just a technical act, it’s an adaptive act. It’s not something that you have, it’s something that you do – it’s active. We have to be out there doing something with it.”
Teddy Robinson-Jones, a Language Arts teacher at Lincoln High School in Ypsilanti, approaches literacy in her classroom in similar ways. “Anyone trying to tackle literacy in a place-based way,” she says, “has to start with what parts of the real world you’re finding in the literature or the ways the literature supports how we communicate about the real world.” For Teddy, literacy at the secondary level is all about the communication loop: being able to read and articulate information from a variety of sources and disciplines, and then doing something with it – responding to it, acting on it, forming an opinion about it. “Ultimately, it boils down to being able to effectively communicate and compromise,” Teddy reflects. “No matter what [students] plan to do, they have to effectively communicate or else things break down – from the micro level of getting your car fixed to the macro level to all the issues you see now across our society. Students need to be able to talk about their opinion, and communicate the facts to support that opinion.”
Teddy, along with several of her colleagues, have been using literature as an anchor for place-based learning for several years. In her class, students read Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street and Night by Elie Wiesel, among other books. “Even at the lower levels,” she says, referring to elementary classrooms, “you’re always looking for the theme and the moral of the story. As we get more complex and students have a more robust understanding of the world around them, we look for how the conflict [in the literature] reflects real world conflicts. We start with asking what’s the problem? And, do we still have that problem?”
She says sometimes this can be easier with nonfiction than fiction. Night’s themes of world conflict, for example, have a lot of connections to the Ypsilanti community. Sometimes, she noted, authentic connections between fiction and students’ lives can feel forced, but that’s where place-based education can help. As her students were reading The House on Mango Street, Teddy herself began to notice the connections to what was happening in their community. “The trick,” she said, “is getting them to notice, too.” So she started asking them questions about gentrification, specifically in Ypsilanti, and how it compares to gentrification in Chicago, the setting of The House on Mango Street, where every character is impacted by gentrification in some way. Through these conversations, students told Teddy that they had started to explore the idea of gentrification during a unit in their geometry class on redlining and had some idea of what the terms meant – but needed connections to how they impact them now.
So Teddy used a lesson from Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law that helped her students break down how redlining affects home loans. She had them look at the actual laws in the region on who could get loans and who couldn’t, and research how other home ownership resources, such as federal grants, were also biased. “That’s when we found the natural segue between Night and The House on Mango Street,” she said, “because the Ypsilanti community was gentrified around Willow Run (a manufacturing plant in Ypsilanti that produced thousands of B-24 bombers in WWII). Everything just kind of fit and was very authentic.”
Jeff says that this is the type of approach to literacy-building he and his colleagues at Wayne RESA hope to see more of. “We want English teachers to see that you can use place-based approaches to teaching literature. If we want to get responsive, and we want to be responsible, and we have this canon, how can we use place as a way to be culturally responsive and to introduce other voices into our classes?” he poses. “I think we’ve got to get serious in the English and literacy world about school and education as a fundamental foundation of our democracy – and this is a multiracial and multicultural democracy. If we’re going to live into that idea, then we’d better start treating our English classrooms that way and start thinking about how we’re going to connect learning and community and continue these lessons forward.”
I asked both Jeff and Teddy where we go from here, given the state of literacy in our region and the proposed changes in literacy resources from the state. Teddy said there was a real and practical need for stronger reading and writing skills in students. “Students need to know how to read, they need to know words, and they need to read, write and speak in every class every day. We need to teach the basics, like main ideas and note making – every time they’re reading something, being able to pull out the important part.” But she also reflected a need for more support to create opportunities for place-based and local learning to make reading relevant. “It’s hard to do this type of unit at the secondary level,” she notes. “We were able to make connections across subject areas only because we were a part of cohorts like SEMIS together and had dedicated time where we could talk our ideas out and make plans.” Ultimately, she thinks this type of learning would have the biggest impact if it was integrated across 3-4 disciplines. “That’s a process.” she says.
For Jeff, the educational community as a whole needs to get clear on what we mean by ‘back to basics’ education and what counts as high quality instructional materials. “We need to redefine what the ‘basics’ are – what we think at the baseline level is what schools and communities are entitled to – and revisit hooks, Friere, Dewey, and even Harriet Tubman,” he says. “School is more than test and workforce preparation, and a boxed, scripted curriculum that tells people what to do, and when to do it… depoliticizes students and teachers in an unhealthy way. You can’t build a fence around the classroom, but we keep trying.”
“Place-based education,” he continues, “says there’s a whole world out there that’s worth exploring – the walls of the classroom are really a fiction. How do you separate what’s happening outside of the classroom with what’s in it? Can [instructional materials] be high quality if students don’t learn to read the world around them? If I don’t know the plants and animals in my own neighborhood – is that high quality? If I never learn to love the place I’m in, is that high quality? If we don’t lift up untold stories, is that high quality?”
“You have to invest in your people and empower your teachers to do this,” Jeff encourages. “I believe that teachers, students, and communities together can write and develop high quality instructional materials or adapt the ones that they bought into high-quality place-based education.”
For SEMIS, as a community that has a historical bias towards place-based learning that emphasizes science, social studies, and math, we know we have a lot of our own learning to do on how to better support literature and language arts teachers to incorporate place-based learning, and also on how to emphasize literacy skills across all disciplines. In this growth, we are deeply grateful for partners like Jeff and Teddy and for resources like the Disciplinary Literacy Essentials from GELN. Through this learning, and even as other parts of the literacy curricula, professional development, and resource landscape shift across the state, we remain committed to elevating the agency and expertise of teachers, students, and community members to transform schools into places where we not only learn about, but practice becoming the just, sustainable, and liberatory communities we believe education is in service of.
To learn more about this month’s conversation partners’ work, we encourage you to check out Teddy’s students’ presentation on the consequences of gentrification from the 2025 SEMIS Community Forum, attend the Wayne RESA Doing Disciplinary Literacy: Place, Problem, and Project-Based Learning summit on May 28th, and learn more about the Literacy Essentials from GELN and the Michigan Association of Intermediate School Administrators.
In Partnership,
Anna Balzer
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