Changing course to pursue the teaching profession

Emel Mousa was 12 when he moved from Syria to the United States. After their arrival in California, Mousa’s family eventually moved to Michigan. He was accepted to the University of Michigan on a scholarship, and he enrolled in LSA to study pre-med.

In addition to a full course load, he also needed to support himself financially, so he took a full-time job as a patient care technician at Michigan Medicine. After a year, he changed roles and began caring for children at Mott Children’s Hospital instead. “Being around children sparked my curiosity about teaching,” he says.

He was two years into studying pre-med when he decided to pivot, and apply to the Educator Preparation Program (EPP). The staff at the Marsal School were there to help him every step of the way. “They understood my situation, and they worked with my timing. They provided me with all of the resources necessary, and I was so, so happy when I got in.”

As an Elementary Undergraduate (ELUG) student, Mousa spent the fall semester of his junior year with his cohort at Perry Elementary School in Ypsilanti. There he took Literacy 1 with professor Tanya Wright, an embedded course in which ELUG students learn concepts about teaching literacy and then practice the techniques they have just learned with elementary students. It is the first of four literacy courses taken throughout the program, and it gives students immediate experience working with young learners, a feature Mousa loved.

“We were all excited to actually work with kids, and once we started working with them, we began to apply a lot of what we were learning in class into the actual field.”

He also enjoyed the opportunity to work with the mentor teachers whose classrooms he practiced teaching in, and valued the relationships he built with the field instructors who guided him on the ground in those classrooms. “The staff at Marsal truly understood my situation of balancing a full-time job and studying what I love—they helped not just with the necessary educational accommodations, but also through communication and encouragement.”

In the winter semester, Mousa was placed in a third grade classroom at an elementary school in Ann Arbor. Over the summer, he participated in the ELD Abroad program traveling to Cuernavaca, Mexico to undertake the English Language Development (ELD) course sequence that will prepare him to teach multilingual learners. His desire to teach this population was born from his own experience learning English as an immigrant student. He says the program—which includes living with a local family and working in classrooms in Cuernavaca—was “life-changing.”

“I encourage every student to take advantage of this opportunity. I also want to let students know that there is financial support available. I was able to attend the program with a lot of financial support, and was able to join all of my friends. I think the education that I received there has shaped me to become a comprehensive educator. I learned how to see education from a different perspective.”

This fall, as a senior, Mousa will do his student teaching in Detroit at the School at Marygrove where he will teach fourth grade. He credits the ELUG program for the significant relationships he’s made with his cohort, gaining a thorough  understanding of the material that he will teach, and becoming equipped with resources that he will use in the field.

“I chose to pursue what I actually wanted to do, which is teaching and working with children, and now I’m seeing the effects of that. I’m seeing the effects of my motivation and of all the encouragement I’m receiving from the Marsal School.”