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Six outstanding seniors share stories of their U-M careers >
As a student Megan Madison has taught children and adults in Ann Arbor, Egypt and India, in classrooms and refugee camps. Her experiences through U-M’s study abroad program have expanded her global awareness and convinced her to teach pre-kindergarteners on Chicago’s South Side after graduation.
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Madison, an LSA Honors College senior who is doing an individualized concentration program in religion, will join the Teach for America program this summer. She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and has received numerous scholarships and awards.
Teaching in Egypt and India was a challenge that taught her she could make a difference, she says. It also helped her decide that she wanted to address educational inequities at home.
“I still consider myself a global citizen and will continue to look for ways to serve abroad,” she says. “But I also want to be part of addressing the urgent needs of my own country and making it the land of equal opportunity that it admirably aspires to be.”
In her freshman year in 2005 Madison enrolled by chance in an introductory religions class, taught by renowned professor Ralph Williams. Inspired by Williams’ lectures, she decided to study comparative religions and designed an individualized concentration program.
With scholarship and news coverage of religion and politics burgeoning after the Sept. 11 attacks, Madison decided to focus on Islam and the Arabic language.
“What I was watching on Fox News was not what I was hearing from my Muslim friends on campus,” she says. “I decided that understanding Islam will help us break down parochialism so that we will not be guided by stereotypes.”
In Fall 2007 she studied at the American University in Cairo, where she also taught English to Sudanese refugees and created a women’s class, focusing on job skills and refugee rights. The following summer she taught English and math in Punjab, India, and helped establish a community center.
“I saw how diverse Islam was,” she says. “My mother, who was in the Peace Corps in Zaire, always taught me to ask questions and not buy into assumptions. The biggest lesson I learned was to be self-reflective about my own culture.”
In Winter 2008 she joined LSA Student Government, where she worked on resolutions focusing on student health care and university policy and participated in service projects in Detroit. Marjorie Horton, LSA assistant dean for undergraduate education and a student government adviser, says Madison brought remarkable interpersonal and communications skills to her efforts.
Madison’s senior honors thesis, “Perceptions of Islam in the West,” is an examination of assumptions about Islam and breaking down stereotypes.
Although she considered continuing a family tradition of joining the Peace Corps, Madison decided instead on Teach for America. “I recognized there is so much to do in our own country to realize the dream of equality we hold up to other countries,” she says.
