3 New features of Detroit Future Schools for the 2013-2014 School Year

Detroit Future Schools is going into its third year of programming and we could not be more excited! We have learned so much from the past two years of integrating digital media arts into Detroit schools and providing year-long teacher professional development in more than 24 schools across the city. Two things have become clear to us:

1) It is possible to transform classrooms into learning communities that advance our full human potential. 2) The inputs required to make this transformation happen are relatively simple.

DFS has honed a set of instructional practices that when applied consistently have proven to create the conditions in which humanizing education can thrive. We measure humanizing education by the presence or absence of 11 Essential Human Skills within a classroom, such as critical consciousness, metacognition, and curiosity. We look for these skills in teachers as well as students.

As classrooms are the cells in the body of our school system, we believe that transformation in education at this level has the potential to transform entire schools, and ultimately, the education system as a whole.

As we enter the 2013-2014 school year, we have re-structured our program to have greater impact in a smaller number of schools. We are excited to announce the following new features of Detroit Future Schools:

ANCHOR SCHOOLS

In two years, DFS has been welcomed into 24 schools across the Metro-Detroit area. This year, we made the decision to only work in four schools: The James and Grace Lee Boggs School, Hamtramck High School, Tri-County Educational Center, and Henry Ford Academy: School for Creative Studies.

This decision was made in part because the two-year, non-renewable federal grant under which we launched Detroit Future Schools ended in 2012. While we were successful in securing contracts to continue DFS in six schools, we decided to work only in the four schools where we see potential for long-term partnership. Administrators at all four of these schools deeply understand and appreciate the vision of DFS and will work with us to generate the funds necessary to sustain the program in their schools moving forward.

We look forward to being able to have a more concentrated impact in a smaller number of schools. At the same time, we plan to create more local and national spaces through which to share the lessons emerging from the in-school program. Ultimately, we believe this scaling-down-to-go-deep approach will strengthen the root system of DFS for the long-term.

ZINE AND TOOLKIT

We are committed to an "open source" approach to humanizing education that will allow the maximum number of people to benefit from the practices and ideas that emerge from our anchor schools. Towards this goal, Detroit Future Schools produced a zine that any teacher, youth or artist in schools can use to integrate the spirit and practices of DFS in their own learning space. The zine includes theDFS Vision Statement and theoretical framework, instructional videos, evaluation templates, and lesson plans.

To accompany this zine we created a toolkit of classroom signage that is essential to the implementation of DFS practices. This toolkit includes: an 11 Essential Skills Poster, a Media Project Workflow Poster, Detailed DFS Timeline for the Year. 11 Essential Skills cards, Debate Signs and Rules, Bloom’s Taxonomy, and a Day One DFS Handout.

RIDA INSTITUTE

For the 2013-2014 school year we will provide more opportunities for educators outside of our Anchor Schools to receive professional development training in DFS core practices.

In February of 2014, DFS will invite educators from across Detroit and the country to participate in the "RIDA Institute" – an intensive three day crash-course in reimagining what is possible within schools. The question “what is the purpose of education?” will frame the institute, as participants explore the educational theories of Paolo Friere, Duncan Andrade, James and Grace Lee Boggs and others.

Moving from theory to practice, RIDA Institute participants will think critically about the specific social and historical contexts in which they work in order to create their own purpose of education statement. From there, they will use the DFS RIDA framework to create visions for their classrooms and the kind of students they will produce. We will share instructional practices for integrating the 11 Essential Skills into classroom content, as well as daily practices for making lesson-planning more efficient and effective.

Participants will have the opportunity to design and refine lesson plans over the course of 3 days, returning to their purpose of education statement to evaluate what instructional practices best allow them to fulfill that purpose. The RIDA Institute will take place in February 2014.

Because space is limited, participants in the institute will be selected through an application process. Enrollment fees will be determined on a sliding scale for individuals and institutions. Contact ammerah@alliedmedia.org for more information.

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Reflections on the first Detroit Future Schools Network Gathering

On June 20, 2013, Detroit Future Schools organized its first ever Network Gathering as part of the 15th annual Allied Media Conference. Ammerah Saidi, Program Coordinator of DFS, shares her experience.

WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO IMAGINE A NEW WAY OF SCHOOLING?

Detroit Future Schools gathered parents, artists, students, teachers, community members, and youth organizers from across Metro-Detroit in our attempt to answer this question.

Allied Media Project’s theory of change states that we need individuals who can imagine and actualize new realities for a more just, creative and collaborative world.

This is a task much easier said than done. Imagining new realities requires a cognitive skillset that is not currently nurtured in our school systems. Schools are dominantly places where information and "knowledge" is frozen in time, meant to be memorized and then regurgitated in written form through state mandated tests. The implications of this truth should be horrifying. Without our ability to see beyond our current experiences and circumstances, how can humans ever hope to dismantle the complex systems of oppression that shape our world? How can we rise above the walls of our present day to see what’s possible in the future and decide what we want our futures to become?

However, as a teacher and citizen of the world, I can sleep at night. Why? Because one truth will never be obliterated: humans are born curious and imaginative. It’s written into our DNA. I see my niece exploring her world – touching and tasting her way around a maze that from her eyes seems unnavigable. I see her twisting and turning her body in ways that she’s never seen before in order to get out of her crib or off a dresser or through a hole she most definitely should not be anywhere near in the first place. Her fearlessness and innovation is the truth I carry with me as I enter school after school where dehumanizing education practices are the norm. Instead of teaching to the test, we need schools that will "teach to our humanity." This is a call that Detroit philosopher-activist Grace Lee Boggs has been making for decades. We’re excited that the James and Grace Lee Boggs School is opening this Fall and will begin modeling what this looks like on a school-wide scale.

GROWING THE DETROIT FUTURE SCHOOLS NETWORK AT THE AMC

At Detroit Future Schools, we are working to prove that teaching to our humanity in our education system as a whole is both pragmatic and revolutionary. We are teaching and learning in ways that foster curiosity and critical thinking, so that schools can become places where students and teachers want to be instead of places they fear not to be – or worse, are legally mandated to be. Over the past two years we have grown a local network of students, teachers, and artists in Detroit who are doing this work in classrooms across the city. We have also grown a national network of supporters and allies. This local-national network made our first gathering possible by contributing $4,350 in 25 days to our Indiegogo campaign.

The goal of our first-ever Network Gathering, held in conjunction with the Allied Media Conference, was to bring together all of the major stakeholders from DFS to reflect on the work we accomplished over the past year, build community, and envision the future of the program. Our day together on June 20 yielded intergenerational moments of collaboration and innovation that I have yet to see consistently in our schools. It began with an icebreaker that found second graders talking to high schoolers about what they believe are possible solutions to problems within schools. Then, youth from our sister organizations, Detroit Future Youth and Detroit Minds and Hearts gave presentations on what kind of programming they’ve been a part of that effectively elevates youth agency and voice. The last half of the day consisted of caucuses and action-planning in cross-generational groups. Rather than dry report-backs, we generated songs, plays and a graphic comic strip to express our ideas for how schools could be better. Our network literally imagined new realities and actualized them in real-time through the arts.

Our day together was far from perfect and our work is far from done but what I take away from this Network Gathering is the optimism, hope and grit it takes to actualize the world we want to see. I want to have students walk out of classrooms saying what I heard students saying at the end of our time together: "Thank you for this opportunity to speak with adults about school" and "this was one of the best days of my life." I want to see singing, drawing and beat-making infused into our core content areas in schools and not reserved for electives.

As we gear-up for the coming school year we will be applying many of the ideas that came out of our Network Gathering. As importantly, we’ll be drawing from the muscle memory of what it looked, felt, and sounded like to create the kind of learning we want and need. True to that Ghandian rule of thumb people love to plaster as email signatures or t-shirt slogans, but rarely have the courage to enact – in room Hilberry B & C on Wayne State’s campus, DFS became the change that we want to see in our schools – and eventually the world. This youth-created videofrom our day offers a glimpse of what this looked like. Thank you to all who made the first-ever DFS Network Gathering so incredible.

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Reflections on DFS' transformative Education Tour of NYC

Teachers and artists-in-residence from AMP’s Detroit Future Schools program recently traveled to New York City to tour peer organizations who are using media for transformative education. The goal of the trip was to explore models of media arts-integration, participatory action research, and youth-leadership development that could be applied to our work in Detroit. DFS 8th grade algebra teacher, Helen Lee, shares her reflections:

I appreciated the opportunity to reflect on our work and the challenges we face in Detroit, while exchanging lessons with organizers and educators in New York.

Our visits were tightly packed yet at every site, we felt a huge space open to our questions and mutual sharing.

We visited the office of the Center for Urban Pedagogy, an organization that partners high school students with community organizations to design educational tools that demystify the complicated policies that directly impact their communities.

We dropped by the Global Action Project to observe Youth Breaking Bordersprogram – an intersection of media making, political education, and youth development.

We met with Jack Martin, associate director of Global Kids' Online Leadership Program. We learned about their process of digital media education that prepares youth to not only access and navigate the digital world, but build their own digital spaces.

To round the trip out, we sat down at CUNY with collaborators of the Public Science Project who have been merging participatory action research and community media to leverage decision-making power in political processes with those who are traditionally left out of the conversation.

On my own, I had arranged a site visit of a school that had piqued my interest. Pam Sporn, a documentary storyteller at Grito Productions welcomed Danielle Filipiak (a DFS teacher alum) and I to the Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High Schoolwhere she has taught media production to youth. On this visit, we observed the inner-workings of the school and engaged in dialogue with almost everyone who crossed our paths – administrators, students, new teachers, founding teachers, program coordinators, and support staff. In every conversation, I found myself connecting more and more dots. I began to see the work Detroit Future Schools does within a larger web of work taking place across the country to create a paradigm shift in education.

From the many organizations we visited, I distilled some common threads that tie our work together, and lessons that can make our work stronger:

Changing our relationship to media changes our relationship to the world. Sonya, a senior at Fannie Lou, shared with me how much her participation in Fannie Lou TV, the after school media club, shaped her perspective on the imapct of media on public opinion and motivated her to attend a post-secondary institution for public broadcasting. "I realized through this process what is not shown to us in the media and the power of people who control media. By participating in FLTV the power was shifted into our hands and we could choose to present what we wanted about our community and ideas."

A student at the Buschwick Academy of Urban Planning, who worked with CUP to investigate the fad and fascination of micro-apartments in their city, told me how the project exposed him to ideas and policies he would have never thought about had the program not existed in his school. He also shared that the immersion in the research process and the opportunities to connect to a network beyond his neighborhood sparked his interest in continuing to learn about housing policies in his city.

Facilitative leadership is key. While many programs offer youth leadership development, too often we are developing youth leaders to replicate broken forms of leadership. However, in all of the programs we visited, we saw how the purpose of leadership is to build leadership in others.

At Global Kids, students learn game design as well as how to teach others how to design games, becoming curators and facilitators of knowledge. The theory of change at Global Action Project recognizes that true liberation exists when a culture of collective process exists. At this organization, which predominantly works outside schools or after school, youth co-plan and co-facilitate sessions for other youth. By providing a space for youth to authentically become integral agents of change, they are able to take on these leadership roles. Program Director Christian stated, "It's amazing what the human imagination can do when it's challenged to think of something differently."

Relevancy matters. This is only my third year of teaching but I am realizing more and more the lack of relevancy in what is learned in schools. What I really value in the organizations and schools that I visited was the emphasis on learning and action around issues that were directly connected to the community.

An educator at Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School, Amanda, shared with me how real world learning experiences not only pushed students to lead their own learning but to also think about the big picture. At Fannie Lou, students are alternatively assessed by their portfolio on three of the core subjects instead of by the New York State Regents. Amanda told me that this structure of relevant evaluation has helped her discover what it means to teach. "Everything I am doing now is more intentional," she stated.

At Public Science Project, participants are pushed to conduct research around their community. In doing so, participants are empowered to produce new knowledge as opposed to remaining only consumers of information.

I am only beginning to wrap my mind around all of the work I was exposed to over my short trip in NYC. I am grateful to have had the experience to connect with and observe others around this work as it has reminded me that there is still more work to be done.

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