Reflections on the PIE Maker Space this spring
Reflecting on our year, 2023!
This year was a time of settling into our new, lateral leadership team made up of Jose Rivas, Kiarra Ambrose, and Cyrah Dardas. We have learned so much about each other, our rhythms and each of our artistic practices that guide so much of our work. Each of us have come to this role with our own life experience grounded in pursuit of humanizing learning in Detroit. We are learning the breadth of our roles as a core team of Executive Directors, developing new programs for learners in Detroit and hosting community offerings. We are deepening our understanding of cooperative leadership, holding of power and expression of liberatory learning.
PIE held the 3rd installment of Radical wellness this summer, a transformative and healing space for education leaders that supported their development of more human-centered learning spaces and lives. During our 8 months together, we explored questions like: What does radical wellness mean for education spaces? And what can leaders do to support individual and collective healing and wellness?
Leaders walked away with practical resources and strategies that provided guidance both individually and collectively on working towards wholeness. One participant shared that Radical Wellness gave her an opportunity to “Finally think about herself”. She went on to share that, so many times in service and leadership positions the focus is on outcomes and not on relationships. She explained that her experience in Radical Wellness allowed her to shift her focus to her own wellbeing, which resulted in her being more attune to the wellbeing of those around her. After having attended our fellowship, many of our leaders committed to using what they learned by continuing to develop personal practices of centering and physical movement to connect to self.
““I will go into my educating spaces more mindful of the human needs of my students (and myself).”
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Jose launched PIE Coffee Break a restful time for teachers to be in community and recharge. Hoping to expand on this work teachers will be invited to use these sessions as a time to re-engage with their purpose. These spaces will hold cohort meet-ups once the PIE Institute (Formerly the RIDA Institute) launches in the summer. This summer intensive is meant to engage teachers seeking to humanize their learning space as well as dedicating their purpose for the school year in a cohort of like minded teachers supporting one another.
This year we had the honor of partnering with teaching artist Maya Davis to host Community As Medicine which supports Detroit educators of color, through facilitated dinners for educators to connect and build community to process their experiences while collectively cultivating a network of support. The pandemic made clear that educators and youth with strong networks of support were the most resilient and this initiative is a direct response to supporting educators and youth to develop these deep and powerful connections.
To archive the findings of this project, PIE Published a book documenting Community As Medicine with support from our community partner and dear friends at BULK space and we were even invited to sell our book at the 2023 Detroit Book Fair.
We are thrilled to have deepened in partnership and relationship with many values-aligned artists, educators, youth and non-institutional learning spaces this year and look forward to continuing to build upon the foundations of trust and play that were forged in 2023. Thank you all for your continued support and we look forward to sharing more about our exciting upcoming community offerings in 2024!
Community As Medicine
Re-Imagining our learning landscape together
“Re-Imagining our learning landscape together
“Without new visions, we don’t know what to build, only what to knock down. We not only end up confused, rudderless, and cynical, but we forget that making a revolution is not a series of clever maneuvers and tactics, but a process that can and must transform us”
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Community As Medicine launched in October of 2022 with the intent to support early career educators, specifically of color in Detroit. The program uses dinners centered on connection and building community with one another to collectively cultivate a network of support to nurture new visions for Detroit’s learning landscape. For this work, educators need to be able to access their imagination to seek out possibility.
We know that teachers who are exhausted and dysregulated by the violence, hopelessness and abandonment they are faced with on a daily basis are not likely to be able to move towards possibility. Our goal is to deepen our support of the individuals that make up the education system, resourcing students, leadership and educators in schools.
In our project, Community As Medicine we host a series of monthly meals, where each portion of the meal is carefully considered, allowing educators to forge relationships. Our first cohort of educators focused on educators in the early stages of their career. The members of our first cohort were selected for their commitment to humanizing learning as well as their commitment to being innovative in their approach to their role as educators. The meals are set in the warmth of a home or garden decorated to commemorate the time of year with flowers, hand dyed linens and artful table setting. Each meal is catered by a local BIPOC chef whose cooking practice intertwines with food sovereignty. Invitee’s are given Care Kits whose contents guide the night's conversation with art, poems from local writers and books that provide access to further study. After years of learning from supporting teachers we have learned that when people feel tended to and cherished for their participation and presence it invites them to begin to process their experiences and this leads to relationship building. With this project we intend to articulate that we understanding that being an educator is a rigorous practice and requires this depth of tending to cultivate growth and retention.
Through these dinners we have invited each other to think about the ways we as educators and learners utilize imagination to re-shape the systems of our circumstances to better serve our students and ourselves. We are deeply grateful for our loving community partners BULK Space and Ceramic School who have generously offered us space, and thought partnership. We are so thankful to each of the participants who bring us their stories, and insights onto how we are holding ourselves and caring for each other as People in education at this time.
