Introducing the “DFS Guide to Humanizing Schooling”

Our mission at Detroit Future Schools (DFS) is to humanize schooling in Detroit. We share what we learn from our classrooms with educators in Detroit and beyond through curriculum consultation with teachers, our annual Rida Institute, and through publications sharing our best practices.

We are excited to share the newly released Detroit Future Schools Guide to Humanizing Schooling. In these pages you will find lessons from our work in more than 30 Detroit classrooms over the past four years of DFS programming. This guide includes tools, best practices, and step-by-step curriculum planning exercises for educators and group facilitators who have a vision for transforming their classrooms.  It includes easy-to-follow interactive activities that can be used and expanded upon within classrooms, as well as supplementary diagrams and worksheets.

The Detroit Future Schools Guide to Humanizing Schooling is an updated and expanded version of the previously released Guide to Transformative Education.

The New Rida Framework

The core of the DFS Guide to Humanizing Schooling is the “Rida Framework,” a planning tool that we have developed to help teachers articulate a clear vision for bringing community context into lesson planning. The Rida Framework is inspired by Jeff Duncan Andrade's article “Gangstas, Wankstas and Ridas.”

For the DFS Guide to Humanizing Schooling we provide an updated Rida Framework based around an interactive, five-step process, which includes:

1. + Mapping your community context
2. + Articulating a clear purpose statement
3. + Creating a vision for your classroom
4. + Identifying essential skills and practices to cultivate in your curriculum
5. + Measuring your progress towards your purpose

The Rida Framework is not only a useful tool for educators, but also may be used by students to investigate their community context and develop their vision for the classroom.

We invite classrooms throughout Detroit and beyond to adapt and evolve these tools to make them their own.

You can purchase a copy of the DFS Guide to Humanizing Schooling here!

You can also get this resource and more DFS classroom tools as part of the DFS Rida Kit, available during the month of September only. This kit includes the following items from Detroit Future Schools:

+ 11 Essential Skills Flash Cards Set + 11 Essential Skills Poster + DFS Tote Bag + Guide to Humanizing Schooling

“Creating Fertile Ground for Growth and Learning”: A student’s reflection on the Free Minds Free People Conference

In July, Detroit Future Schools participated in Free Minds Free People, a national conference that brings together teachers, students, researchers, parents and activists to explore how we can use education as a tool for liberation. Wayne Bussey II, Issra Killawi, and Alondra Casteñeda, participants in our Out-of-School Project (OSP), joined DFS’ director Nathaniel Mullen in presenting a session called “Humanizing Schooling in Detroit.”

Over the three days of the conference, we were able to connect with other educators and youth, attend sessions such as “Ethnic Studies for all the Youth” and “Consequences and Community in the Beautiful Struggle” and hear a powerful opening keynote address by Jeff Duncan Andrade, a teacher and educational scholar whose work has greatly influenced DFS’ pedagogy.

These experiences were especially meaningful for our OSP participants as they are exploring issues of structural education injustice in Detroit. We left the conference feeling inspired and re-energized to continue our work towards humanizing schooling!

Read Issra’s beautiful reflection on the FMFP conference below:

“Creating Fertile Ground for Growth and Learning” by Issra Killawi

As I listened to the keynote speaker, Jeff Duncan Andrade, on the first day of the Free Minds Free People Conference, I knew that he was sharing something very powerful, but I couldn’t immediately grasp exactly what it was that resonated with me. Two days after that, I presented with Detroit Future Schools on humanizing schooling in Detroit. For me, humanizing school meant being able to exist in the classroom as a whole person, beyond the never-ending subject matter that had to be covered. However, even when I say this statement to myself, it sounds very elusive. So I will try to put these thoughts into perspective.

Everyone agrees that high school can be a tough time. I spent four years of school with a group of people who probably had their own, very personal struggles. We were all struggling to understand ourselves, our emotions, and who we wanted to be. As a student body of an Arab American majority, many of us were trying to balance our cultural roots with our American upbringing, whether we were aware of it or not. Then there was this incredible phenomenon called puberty and raging hormones! But there was no room for any of these things in my high school classes. Had we been able to exist as nuanced individuals in the classroom rather than just “students” we could have made much stronger connections to our learning and to our peers. We didn’t have the time, space, or direction needed to process anything that did not relate to the learning objectives in each lesson plan.

In piecing this reflection together, I can remember something that specifically impacted me from the keynote speaker’s address at the FMFP Conference. He played a short clip of “Children Full of Life,” a documentary about a classroom in Japan, where a child whose grandfather had recently passed away wrote about his experience with grief and loss and shared it with the whole class. More powerful than his writing was the reaction from his peers. Some students listened attentively, their faces drawn in empathy towards his pain. Others began to cry, and slowly some of them shared their own struggle of losing a loved one. Students physically comforted each other and expressed their concern for the pain they were witnessing in others around them.

I share that to say this: anything that we struggle with is fertile ground for growth and learning. High school, especially, is full of such opportunities. But when we segregate learning from our personal experiences, we ignore so much of what it means to think, feel, and change. When you don’t have room for self-discovery, self-awareness and developing emotional intelligence at one of the ripest times in an individual’s life and most ironically, in the spaces designated for people to learn, then what does it matter if you know about every subject except your own self?

DFS Data Murals Project: What Stories Can We Tell From Data?

During the 2014-2015 school year, Detroit Future Schools completed two “data mural” projects in Detroit schools, supported by the Bay and Paul Foundations, the Knight Arts Challenge and the Michigan Council for Arts & Cultural Affairs.

A data mural is public art that engages community members in a dialogue about data-driven representations and misrepresentations of their community. We worked with two of our anchor schools – The James and Grace Lee Boggs School and Tri County Educational Center – to create the data murals over the course of six months.

Our goal was to conduct research with each classroom about their school communities and convey our findings through public art. Each classroom was paired with a Detroit Future Schools teaching artist who helped them express their research through compelling visual language and graphics.

The Boggs School: How to be a Boggs School Student?

At The James and Grace Lee Boggs School, teaching artist Alicia López Castañeda worked with the 2nd and 3rd grade students of the “Painted Turtles” classroom and their teacher Liz Kirk to develop a mural based on the question, “How to be a Boggs School Student?” inspired by the classroom’s “how-to” writing unit. The mural would also serve as a kind of “how-to” text to pass on to future Boggs School students.

The students brainstormed around this question through creative writing activities that considered: Who are we? Where do we come from? What do we know how to do?” They used digital audio recorders to interview each other and from the answers they developed their own “data set” around the theme of how to be a Boggs School student. They displayed this data in the form of a map, then clustered the information into three major themes of identity, literacy, and friendship.

Alex B. Hill, a local graphic designer and infographic maker led the students through a drawing exercise in which they translated the information they wanted to convey into a visual language of faces, letters, and flowers. Muralist Phil Simpson compiled the students’ original drawings into a final design that conveyed the story that they wanted to tell.

The project’s learning community expanded beyond the classroom to include the school and its surrounding community. At the end-of-the-year block party, students participated in a skill-share at which they created and shared “how-to” texts or manuals that taught hands-on skills such as how to knit, how to do backflips, and more. The data mural ended up becoming a community project as family and friends helped finish the painting. These school-community interactions strengthened and reinforced the Boggs School’s commitment to place-based education.

By placing the students at the center of the curriculum it shook up the normal dynamics of a classroom. In the skill-share the teacher-student dynamic shifted as students became teachers, and teachers moved out of their traditional roles as the sole distributors of information. Instead everyone became an authority of their own knowledge. Learn more about the process of making the mural here.

The DFS Data Murals project cultivated essential character skills in the students, such as collaboration, empathy and grit – three of the “DFS 11 Essential Skills.” When asked to define these skills during an end-of-program interview, one third grade student answered, “collaboration is when kids do it together and they include everyone. Empathy is when – let’s say Raphael is sad – I would come over to Raphael and I would know how he felt because I’ve been sad before and I know how it feels to be sad. Grit is when someone wants to give up, and they don’t give up.”

Tri County Educational Center: How Do Schools Measure Success?

Tri-County Educational Center (TCEC) is an alternative school for Metro Detroit, serving young people who have either dropped out or been expelled from other school districts. Detroit Future Schools program director Nate Mullen worked with graphic design students in the 9th through 12th grades, along teachers Adelaide Fabiilli and Brooke Leiberman to create their data mural.

They used drawing, painting, graphic design, student-led research, and mosaic art to explore the question “Can Design Save the World?” The students brainstormed problems in their community that they wanted to address through graphic design and determined to focus their research on the obstacles that prevent students from graduating from high school. Starting with the question “How do schools measure success?” They researched standardized testing, interviewed their school principal, and surveyed fellow students. Through a process of mosaic design, the mural evolved to become a graphic representation of the students’ many different ideas of success. Learn more about the process of making the mural here.

In describing the mural, one student wrote, “the mural represents that there are multiple ways of deeming yourself successful. The most intricate message is the brain, which shows knowledge in a book beside it. This explains that knowledge is very important when becoming successful.”

The Data Murals project gave us the opportunity to create captivating public art that merges the talents of artists with the stories of communities and the leadership of young people. The murals also helped spark conversation within the broader community through their unveiling at end-of-the-year events including the TCEC Spring Festival and the Boggs School community block party.