Eastern Michigan University already had a longstanding relationship with 826 Michigan when they decided that it was time to move out of their downtown Ann Arbor location after being there for 15 years. And now that they have completed their relocation in time for the start of the fall semester, 826 Michigan is being hosted in Porter Hall, right in the middle of the Eastern campus.
“All of our programs are free and open to any student who wants to participate,” Megan Shuchman, executive director for the program, said.
The nationwide foundation specializes in literacy proficiency for students from kindergarten through twelfth grade and can even help with college level proficiency. Founded in San Francisco; it has since spread to nine chapters nationwide.
The relationship between EMU and 826 means that when they go to help students in Detroit, Ann Arbor or Ypsilanti, prospective teachers from Eastern can come along and get in-classroom experience with kids. Now, those college students won’t need to find their old location on Liberty Street to get that relationship started. They’ll now just need to go down to room 103 on campus.
“826 Michigan has been a strong partner for EMU for over 20 years, and the College of Education has been central to that partnership,” said Ryan Gildersleeve, dean of the College of Education at Eastern Michigan University. In order to get an initial teaching certification at Eastern, he said, “all of our initial certification teacher candidates do 600 hours of field experience, or clinical experience time, in educational settings. And some of those hours are built into actual, individual courses, as part of their course assignments. That is how we have partnered with 826 Michigan. Having them move into the same building as the College of Education helps to strengthen that partnership and build it into our curriculum in a more sustainable way.”
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The previous location was called Robot and Supply. This was because of a somewhat confusing arrangement where each storefront chapter had its own store-like theme to make students feel like they were going to a store and not a round of after-school programing. That model became untenable when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down in person foot traffic and was not bouncing back. This model will not be returning.
The 826 staff help students in one of two ways. They will either partner with school districts to go into classrooms to help with projects or set up after school workshops at school districts, libraries or at their own premises.
Shuchman said that students for the latter are “either kids who get referred to us by their teacher, or maybe their parent, who says to us that ‘my student really needs some extra work in literacy in writing. Or they’re kids who are like ‘I really like reading and creative writing, and I know that that’s a thing I want to do, and I’m looking for a place to home my skills and get published.’”
In fact, 826 does publish work of students in short run books. They can be anything from best of collections of student poetry, to short stories written by a class of students that get bound into a collection and anything in between.
And they don’t just go online. These students can see their hard work in actual, physical books, which are put up for sale.
Registration for 826’s Fall programs opened on August 22. You can sign your child up for their programs using an online form.
