PIE 2018: A Year in Review

The glow up is real.

A year ago, we were at the very start of a new journey. We had a new name and a refined mission, and we were excited about the work we were doing.  

We also came up against some real challenges of not having a team, funding or the support we needed to build on that work. We were understaffed and overwhelmed, so much so that we had to postpone one of our key programs. We moved out of our long-term home at Allied Media Projects, into a new space where we had few connections. So much was new and unclear, but I am proud to say that we have grown from many of those challenges and now we are doing our best work ever.

I want to take a moment to highlight some of our achievements from this year.

Conversations during PIE Lab

Collaborative creating during PIE Lab

Green screen photoshoot during PIE Lab

Outdoor fun at the Rida Institute

Bachata at the Rida Institute!

Collective making at the Rida Institute

Trash Life incinerator scene

Behind the scenes of Trash Life

We put the people in PIE.

After many years of work, we’ve finally built a team of people here to support our mission. Our new Fundraising and Communications Assistant is making waves in our grant, social media and email communications channels. And our artist-in-residence (AIR) work has been expanded and streamlined thanks to our new AIR Coordinator. Growing our administrative capacity has allowed us to launch new and improved programming.

Trash life: We produced riveting, zaney media

Trash Life has been our biggest media release ever! The film was created during the 2016/2017 school year by The Painted Turtles, a classroom of first and second graders at the James and Grace Lee Boggs School. Their teacher Kelly Rickert and PIE teaching artist Matt Daher facilitated the filming process along with PIE Arts Assistant, Ever Bussey. This past spring PIE showcased Trash Life at Cinema Detroit, and over 100 people — family and friends — came out to see their work and hear their experiences during a panel after the screening. This was an outpouring of love, and we’ve never been able to screen a media project at this scale! The film has gone on to be screened at Allied Media Conference and the Place-Based Education Conference at Eastern Michigan University, and it’s just shy of 500 views on YouTube. Our work with Trash Life has set a new standard for how we put media into the world!

pie lab: We started something new

This fall, we launched our very first PIE Lab, a training for Artist Educators to cultivate skills for facilitating collaborative art projects. Training artists to be facilitators has been a profound need at PIE and at other arts education projects. At PIE, we are uniquely suited to provide that training, between our eight years of hosting artists residencies and our experience of facilitating trainings for educators. PIE Lab yielded even more learning and some amazing, collaborative media — check it out here! We’re excited about this beautiful community we’ve created and we look forward to offer it again in years to come.

“To meet and plan with like minded teachers offers various perspectives in a safe and welcoming environment while allowing participants to truly flourish.”

— Kiarra Ambrose

We renewed and refined what we know and love

OMG! I mean have you seen our 2018 programing!? It’s fire! This year we’ve refined both our teacher training -- the Rida Institute -- and our artist residency, allowing us to train the largest Rida cohort since the first year we launched it. With our AIR program, we are exploring one theme across all three projects: school lunch. We launched the artist residency this fall with our first community partnership at Alternatives For Girls and we’re excited get to work.

It Ain’t Over

This is still the beginning of our journey, but we have made significant strides and we’re more clear about how we want this work to grow. At the start of 2018, we set out to grow through relationships with operation PIE Pals, and this is just what we’ve done. In 2019, we will make media that creates a platform for our young people to tell their stories about schooling. We will continue to facilitate spaces for artists and educators to connect to their personal purpose and develop relationships that celebrate and support them through questions or burnout. Our work to humanize schooling is a commitment to change that happens through people, and we want to make media and spaces that honor people-centered transformation.

Our work wouldn’t be so dope without our community -- our woes -- showing up, coming through, liking, reposting and just sending good vibes. Thank you.

We’re excited to do more and we hope you are too! Give to PIE, and help us continue to create humanizing classrooms.

Thank you for your support, in thought and in deed.

N8

Director, People in Education

Experiencing More of Ourselves: Reflections on Rida 2018

Photo by Justin Milhouse

In August, 16 compassionate educators from across Metro Detroit convened for our 2018 Rida Institute Summer Intensive.

In the five years we have lead this training, every year we’re surprised by how it unfolds.  With each iteration, we work to refine the training and weave in our new learnings.

Our purpose with the Rida Institute is to facilitate a transformative space for educators to create more humane lives and more humanizing educational spaces. This year, we centered connection between people in the classroom, brought amazing guests to enrich the space and reaffirmed our commitment to our purpose as educators.

Practicing Connection

When you are connected to yourself and to others you are much more able to show up, and how we show up as educators sets the tone of all the work we do. Connection can invoke joy, create space for collaboration and help turn strangers into co-creators and idea collaborators, into project partners and friends. What happens if we begin from this frame of reference in our classrooms everyday? At the Rida Institute, we return to this practice several times; over the three days it is always our starting point.

Photo by Erin Allen

We practice connection by inviting educators to use simple questions as tools for building relationships, and what usually starts as a quiet space of relative strangers explodes with voices speaking about their values, their lives and their work. So often as educators we want our students connect with each other, but we rarely have the opportunity to practice doing that ourselves. It turns out that making connections can be simple but we rarely make room for it, blaming busy schedules and urgent content. But starting with relationships between people learning together is just as important.

Amazing Guests

One of our favorite components of the summer intensive is highlighting the voices of people representing disparate intersections of education. Guest presenters activate the space and provide necessary dynamism to our ideas about humanizing schooling.

“It’s about the learning; it’s not about the grade. I want to make the grade irrelevant. For a lot of students, that F has followed them their whole lives. It takes a lot for a student to disconnect that grade from their identity.”

— Ammerah Saidi

Four guest presenters -- more than we’ve ever had -- shared their expertise on what it means to create humanizing educational spaces. Five young people from 482Forward Youth shared the motivations, learnings, successes and hopes for their work in education policy across Michigan.

Activist, healer and author adrienne maree brown spoke about employing emergent strategy to transform a classroom into a collective creation between educators and students. Author and educator Carla Shalaby illuminated the impact of punitive practices in schools and reintroduced us to the “troublemaker” as a resistor to dehumanizing classroom management. Educator and former PIE Director Ameerah Saidi gave us a glimpse into her classroom, demonstrating how content becomes a tool to explore and challenge the status quo.

Defining Purpose

“My purpose as a teacher is to fan the flame so that students can know in themselves and in one another the gifts that lie within them and help them unbury them, unwrap them, find delight in them, and build skills to empower them.”

— Rose Crowley, Rida participant

Our purpose is our reason for being and doing, and it’s an incredible source of power. In a system where teachers often feel unsupported, overstretched and disempowered, returning to their purpose becomes vital for their resilience and ability to create relevant and compassionate classrooms.

If we aren’t clear on why we’re in a classroom, we are beholden to the multitude of tasks that appear day to day. When we are present on purpose, we are clear about what our job is as educators. From this point of clarity, teachers can cast out the distractions that often lead to burnout and focus on the work that gives us life.

This is the sentiment we aim to awaken in educators when we ask them to explore and refine their purpose for doing this work.

Photos by Justin Milhouse

WHAT NOW?

Have you ever fallen in love with a room full of people? You look around the room and feel deeply connected to every single person in that room. You are bursting with benevolence and hopeful wishes for every person. And you just want to see each of them blossom into the biggest, baddest flower you ever seen. That is how we left this year’s Rida summer intensive -- connected, inspired and ready.   

We are so excited to continue working with these teachers throughout this current school year, as we meet monthly to support each other in bringing our purpose to fruition in our educational spaces. You can learn more about PIE’s practices and the Rida Framework in our Guide to Humanizing Schooling. Read the guide online or purchase a copy at the AMP Store.

support our work in training teachers to create humanizing classrooms.

PIE Lab: A space to generate and collaborate

Photo by JLG Foto

In October 2018, we gathered with nine Artist Educators at Brilliant Detroit to explore what it means to work at the intersection of art and education.

Over the years we’ve seen that oftentimes, artists are working in community without a network of support. For three days we dived into the challenges many Artist Educators face. We also looked at the strategies they use to do this work. It was an outpouring of lessons, and we want to share a few in reflection.

“Being a teaching artist can be isolating because you see only the kids and it’s hard to work with other teaching artists because they’re doing the same thing.”

— Karilu Forshee

A space for Artist Educators

Artist Educators work at intersections, not only of art and education, but also organizing, administration, advocacy, design and more. These intersections culminate into one of the greatest strengths of this work and make finding your way to this work difficult. It also makes it hard to find spaces that allow you to improve your craft as an Artist Educator or find peers to have conversations with about where the field is heading.

Many Artist Educators start by doing work in classrooms and communities that is well intentioned. Sometimes the results are good and other times they are harmful to students, to that community and to the artists’ development. Because there is a demand for this work but there aren’t spaces to help people develop into Artist Educators, many artists are given jobs in communities without the skills they need to be successful.

Over these three days we attempted to solve this problem by creating a space for Artist Educators to come together and define what they do, to discover best practices and learn from one another.

Three Days

PIE Lab was made up of three parts. Each day we actively created art together, we explored big questions and we heard from other artists who are doing collaborative creating in their communities.

Photo by JLG Foto

On the first day, we explored how our own training as artists impacts how we show up as facilitators. We acknowledged that  many artists are developed in a competitive environment, which is a sharp contrast to the collaborative work of an artist educator. We also heard from Sacramento Knoxx and Raychel Gafford from The Aadizookaan about how and why they use art to organize their community in Southwest Detroit.

On the second day, we identified and refined our purpose as Artist Educators. We worked together to explore how that purpose can impact our facilitation. We also heard from Jova Lynn Vargas about her work balancing a career as a teaching artist, curator and manager of her own personal studio practice.

“Our greatest power lies in our truth. Many times we undercut the potency of what we create to align it with certain standards. Those standards, when they were formed, had nothing to do with our collective well being or wholeness.”

— Sterling Toles

On day three, we sat with Sterling Toles and talked about his approach to making art as a form of collective healing. We then wrapped up by exploring PIE’s approach to  media making by creating together.

Across the three days we pulled from the last eight years, where we at People In Education have used media-making as a process of empowerment. We’ve used the creative process to investigate and address the issues in our communities. Media- making isn’t the end goal—it’s the vehicle through which we develop essential skills around connection and curiosity.

This is a growing field, and we hope that our work at PIE Lab can contribute to the development of this practice, of artists creating with and within communities.

Photos by JLG Foto and Erin Allen

What’s next

November marked the first quarterly meet-up in a series that will provide further professional development opportunities and cultivate a supportive community where artists can troubleshoot challenges and share successes. Starting next year, these meet-ups will continue to take shape according to the inclinations and curiosities of the artists.

A part of this continued convening of PIE Lab participants is an opportunity for them to observe each other’s community work, reflect and offer feedback.

And three PIE Lab participants are a part of our Artist-in-Residence (AIR) program, so stay tuned to see their upcoming work with young people and Detroit education communities around the theme of school lunch.