LEAPS Welcomes Its Inaugural Cohort: the Class of 2028

The incoming freshman make up the first class in the Marsal School's new major, Learning, Equity, and Problem Solving for the Public Good (LEAPS). LEAPS is a four-year bachelor's degree in education, designed to prepare students for a wide range of professional careers. It has many unique elements that distinguish it from the traditional undergraduate experience, including an educational approach based upon our best knowledge of how people learn. Here's what LEAPsters have been up to since they arrived on the scene at U-M.

Move-in Day

On a Thursday morning in late August, 27 students hailing from as nearby as Metro Detroit and as far away as Taiwan, moved into freshly renovated dorm rooms in Florent Gillet Hall on the Marygrove campus. Incoming students brought with them suitcases, mini-fridges, and great anticipation about one of the program’s key features—living and learning in Detroit for their first year of college at the University of Michigan.

That evening, Marsal School leadership and faculty who teach in the LEAPS program, as well as representatives from the P-20 Partnership, community partners, and neighbors attended a barbecue to welcome new students and their families to campus.

All the City a Classroom

The LEAPS curriculum prepares students to become “learning leaders” who know how to partner with peers, communities, and organizations to create change. Visiting sites like the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Detroit Historical Museum, and the Detroit Riverfront, and learning from Detroiters throughout the city bring these lessons to life. In the City as Identity course taught by LEAPS Program Manager Jay Meeks, students watched the documentary Detroit 48202: Conversations Along a Postal Route, which follows a postal worker along his mail route as he talks to residents about how their community has changed in the decades since the Birwood Wall was built. Erected in 1941, the wall divided the Black community in the Eight Mile-Wyoming area of Northwest Detroit from Blackstone Park, from a newly constructed white subdivision. The six foot wall remains—now covered in murals—a reminder of the redlining that it once enforced. In 2021, the U.S. Parks Service added the wall to the National Register of Historic Places.

A focus of Meeks’s course is engaging with the city using primary sources. While visiting the Birwood Wall, students read an article that was published the year it was built. They also heard from Teresa Moon, a community leader who grew up in the neighborhood, and who still lives in the house her parents bought in 1959. Drawing on the information they had taken in, students then employed the technique of “erasure poetry” to create new verse out of the newspaper article, reflecting the nuanced history they had just learned about.

Outside of Class

Students have spent the fall getting to know the city of Detroit by participating in traditional events like the Detroit Jazz Festival. A shuttle bus that provides transportation to the U-M campus in Ann Arbor has also made it possible for LEAPSters to partake in student activities, not the least of which are trips to the Big House on Saturdays. Students are also taking part in community-focused activities around the Marygrove campus organized by the Live6 Alliance and local groups like the Marygrove Community Association.