Supported by funds from the Provost and Great Lakes Center for Truck and Transit Research, the University of Michigan, and Transportation Research Institute, Moving America is an interdisciplinary course focused on transportation. The course is four credit hours and includes an academic service-learning component with Kaiser Elementary School. The course examines the scientific and social impact of transportation from the views of cultural landscape, history, and chemistry. Chemistry will include the use of scientific notation and interpretations of tables, plots, and charts. The history of transportation technology and its effect on the US economy, big business, mass production, and the automobile industry.
Cultural landscape covers how transportation has reshaped the built environment in the local area.
These are combined in seminars and by having students assist teachers at the Henry J. Kaiser Elementary School in Ypsilanti. Moving America has three faculty members. Ted J. Ligibel, ., Dr. Jose Vites, and Russell Douglass Jones. Ligibel is currently a professor of historic preservation in EMU's Historic Preservation Program in the Department of Geography and Geology. The tentative course outline shows that each week there is a different topic of transportation.