People in Education is a media arts organization committed to humanizing learning by facilitating space for
connection, curiosity and reflection.
We bring media artists-in-residence into learning spaces to facilitate student-led investigations. Their research culminates in collaborative media projects.
We offer a yearlong, personal and professional development for educators, called the Rida Institute. Through Rida, educators gain the skills to nurture authentic youth voice and leadership in their classrooms.
We are a proud sponsored project of Allied Media Projects (AMP).
History
We were founded in 2011 as Detroit Future Schools (DFS), a part of AMP’s Detroit Future Media program. Our primary focus was to make classroom content more relevant to youth’s lives by creating student-led media projects based on issues in their communities. In our first year, we gleaned two valuable lessons:
To effectively transform classrooms, we must transform not only students but also the adults.
Before youth and adults can claim their power as agents of positive change -- either through media or in their communities -- they must first experience more humanizing classrooms in which authentic learning can occur.
These learnings expanded our vision for DFS beyond the classroom and led to the creation of the Rida Institute and the Guide to Humanizing Schooling. We continued to refine our understanding of humanizing schooling through The Out of School Project (OSP). Youth in the OSP conducted research that called us to focus more on relationships and connection. In 2017, we re-branded as People in Education. Our new name is a representation of our goal to prioritize the transformative power of relationships between people - adults and youth alike - in our education system.
Shifting from Schooling to Learning
As an ever evolving organization, we continue to learn from our efforts to humanize the schooling experience. Since we were founded, we have been called to reckon with the impermanent concept of “school” and embrace the reality that learning happens anywhere and everywhere. Through connection, curiosity and reflection, we aim to humanize not just schooling, but learning for all people in education. PIE is a place to practice centering the heart and human elements of learning. We believe it is this approach that will support our individual and collective liberation.