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.
