Where We Learn: Collaborate with PIE’s teaching artist to create media that examines the environment at school

People in Education is seeking youth learning spaces, educators, classrooms and organizations to partner with our artist-in-residence program starting November, 2019.

Artist-in-Residence

PIE’s Artist-in-Residence (AIR) program partners artists, educators and young people to make media that uncovers stories at the heart of the schooling experience. The basics:

• Over four months, we explore a complex education issue centered on a yearly theme, resulting in a collaborative, digital media project.

• The program seeks to embrace the complexity and intersectionality inherent in educational policy and reform.

• It allows young people to discuss and showcase this complexity through our programmatic pillars of curiosity, connection and reflection, all while encouraging creativity through media making. 

Last year, our making process evolved such that each media project shared a common theme. This year, we continue that model with outstanding Teaching Artist, Cyrah Dardas. She will work with each partner to develop media projects focused on the theme of school environment.

why school environment?

Media from summer 2019 with PIE and 482 Youth

This year’s theme was influenced by research from our recent summer partnership with 482 Youth, who explored the question, “What about school is inhumane?” They discovered four main themes from their research: food, teachers, class content and environment. The environment topic evoked conversation about the physical space in and around schools, to psychological and physical safety to questions of climate change and disability justice.

While funding for school facilities is debated and the effects of school closures continue to plague neighborhoods and communities, Detroit students attend school in environments that are woefully unsupportive of learning. And it doesn’t go by unnoticed by Detroit students. 

This year we will make media that critically examines how school environment affects learning by:

• Exploring: How does the school environment serve us and not serve us?

  We will start by looking at how our schools are designed by auditing students’ schools to explore the design choices. Young people will examine the architecture itself, along with the lighting, color and more. We’ll also research the interaction between design and accessibility.

• Researching: Determine a research question and dive in. 

  Once we have audited the space context, we will choose one aspect that we want to focus on and address. This phase includes research activities such as speaking to subject matter experts and looking at how other people innovate in our interest area.

• Making: Collaborative, student-centered media making

  Once we’ve learned about the environment and design, we’ll start dreaming and designing solutions to address issues we found in the learning phase. Young people will design the way they want their school environment to look and feel.

What we’re looking for in a partner* 

Educators, youth learning spaces and organizations who:

• Work with young people on art, technology, health, environment, school culture and/or issues in social justice.

• Can work with a consistent group of students over the course of the four-month program (January-April).

• Are open to a collaborative creating process between themselves, their students and PIE artists-in-residence.

* We are only seeking partners who are educators and/or representatives in youth learning spaces and organizations. We are not hiring teaching artists; Cyrah Dardas will be the sole artist-in-residence this year.

apply to become an AIR partner

If you’re interested in becoming an AIR partner, complete this form by Monday, November 4, 2019 to tell us more about yourself and your work. The form will take about ten minutes to fill, and we’ll follow up later in November with more details.

Moving at the Speed of Trust: Reflections on the Rida 2019 Intensive

Photos by J. Lindsey Photography

This summer we gathered with 13 educators from Southeast Michigan, New York and Nebraska to create a transformative space in which to cultivate more humane classrooms and practices.

Now in our sixth year, our intention to model the design of humanizing learning spaces remains paramount, and we’ve seen how this modelling has transformed the Rida space itself. Interwoven into this year’s summer intensive were two of our most valuable lessons so far. For one, we recognized that Rida has become more than professional development. And secondly, we prioritized the access needs of every human present. 

Access Needs

“An access need is something a person needs to communicate, learn and take part in an activity. Many people have access needs.”

New this year was the daily practice of checking in on what folks need to be present in the space. Examples were, “I often don’t hear well, so I may ask people to speak up,'' or “I have a sick kid and might need to step out to take a call.” And those who felt like their needs are met could say so. 

This concept came to us from the work of disability justice organizers during the Allied Media Conference Facilitation Network Gathering, and it was refined by the Generative Somatics Leadership training. 

- Pacific Alliance on Disability Self-Advocacy project

The practice of asking if people had what they needed invited a complex layer of humanity that was felt each day. What could be more humanizing than acknowledging that we have needs, bodies and lives that exist regardless of the present moment, while simultaneously interacting with the present moment?

This invitation brought malleability to our daily activities, so we could better align them with the group’s needs. On day three of this practice, Nate Mullen, Rida’s lead facilitator, also requested “support in holding space.” He reflected on this moment: 

“A combination of all the energy of facilitating and my daughter not sleeping the prior night had left me a bit tender and I was moving slowly. In all my years of teaching and facilitating, I have never been able to be so upfront and clear about where I am and what support I need to facilitate. Instead, here I was able to … dispel the myth that a good teacher is a superhuman teacher who is always at 100%. I could model that my vulnerability is actually one of the most powerful places to lead from and can make room for the leadership of the whole group.”

As we’d hoped, introducing access needs into the intensive also shifted how some participants thought about how they show up as teachers. One participant, Avery Shelton, talked about centering the needs of both her students and herself:

In early childhood education, we are constantly thinking about how to meet the needs our our students… It is so easy to forget that adults have needs too. When the access needs of educators are given attention, we can feel recognized and seen as humans.

We are deeply excited to bring such a resonant practice to Rida, where educators can return over and over again for new approaches to humanizing their learning spaces. 

A PLACE TO GATHER

“This isn’t professional development. It’s a journey.”

— Nate Mullen, Lead Faciliator

This realization from the 2019 intensive is perhaps one of the most profound: The Rida Institute has grown into a homecoming, a recurring gathering place for like minded people in education. We’ve known for years that this is more than professional development, but what we didn’t know is that its becoming more than a training. It's like a pilgrimage for our collective work of humanizing schooling.

We’ve returned to the Rida every summer for the last five years and that pattern has created an energy, an atmosphere and a community. This year we tapped into that energy by hosting a reunion dinner during the intensive to gather Rida participants past and present. We also invited alumni to a panel on day three to share their lessons from integrating Rida principals into their teaching practice and wider world. 

Photos by Mari Visualz

The dinner and panel showed us that this work is integrated into the lives of educators and the students who have touched it. And when they need a refresher, educators know they can always return to their purpose in the Rida space. During the panel, Rida alumna Bushra Rahman spoke about her difficulty counteracting the dehumanizing culture at school and how that informed her experience joining the Rida for a second year.

My first year of teaching [was] everything between nice and ugly… After this Rida experience I will be able to hold myself accountable to ensure that I myself will actively attempt not to dehumanize myself, my students, and our environments.

And her fellow panelist, Kiarra Ambrose, shared how lessons from Rida in years past inform her teaching practices today:

I adjust my teaching to see who the students are and how they are when they enter the classroom.

What a perfect parallel to what the Rida 2019 intensive became: an accessible space for Ridas old and new to show up as they are, creative, reflective and transformed. 

Photos by J. Lindsey Photography

For more from the 2019 Rida Intensive, check out our photo album with moments captured by Julianne Lindsey and Marisol Sanchez. And see some fun and delicious #Rida2019 moments in action on our Instagram story.

“Getting Free, Imagining Freedom”: Reflections on Free Minds Free People 2019

A month ago, PIE and 482Forward Youth traveled to Minneapolis, MN to present at the 12th semi-annual Free Minds Free People Conference (FMFP). Our director Nate Mullen joined Emily Gonzales, Valeria Rios-Hernandez and Matt Homrich Knieling to share learnings and practices of organizing and humanizing schooling to an audience as hungry for conversation and transformation in education as we are. But what we experienced went beyond the content of our workshop. We heard from dynamic panelists, including Mariame Kaba and David Stovall who spoke about youth incarceration and the school-prison nexus. We saw beautiful performance art from the creators and members of Indigenous Roots. We learned about citizenship and immigration at school in a state named for its native people and a city known for its immigrant population. And we explored the Twin Cities, where local vendors fed us and residents welcomed us and shared their history and traditions. 

In the weeks after FMFP, we spoke to 482Forward Youth about their experiences in the Twin Cities and attending the conference. They traveled together with young people from Detroit Area Youth Uniting Michigan (DAYUM), an activist organization run by high school students. We asked them about their travels, connections, learnings and inspirations. 

“Very surprising to see not only people that react surprised to things we experience, but also people that relate to us. Knowing that people thousands of miles away have the same experiences as us just makes me feel even more empowered to make a change.”

— Valeria Rios-Hernandez, 482Forward Youth member

“The downtown area was pretty similar to ours,” said Valeria Rios-Hernandez, 482Forward Youth member and college freshman. “I do feel like I didn’t get to get the full Minneapolis experience because we were downtown where there was so much gentrification. But… there was a lot of people of color there so I did feel at home.” 

Speaking of people of color, Rios-Hernandez and her fellow 482Forward Youth member Emily Gonzales, a high school sophomore from Detroit, spoke frequently about the immigrants and indigenous people in Minneapolis and at the conference. If FMFP’s goal with its location and programming was to inspire more work around race equity and inclusion, they succeeded with these young people.  Their experiences were so profound that they were excited to bring their learnings back to Detroit. 

“Since I’m joining MI Students Dream, we are planning to show students how to get a higher education being undocumented in Detroit,” said Gonzales. She explained this while reflecting on the “Disrupting the School-to-Deportation Pipeline” workshop put on by Teach Dream and New York State Youth Leadership Council (NYSYLC). “If they’re doing this in another city, it’s possible for us to do it in Detroit. They knew what they were talking about and they made it very sweet and to the point.”These astute observations and conclusions didn’t stop with the workshop. Gonzales also talked about FMFP’s uplifting of indigenous communities and how it could shape her work with 482Forward’s semi annual conference planning. 

“I like how they started off the first day with the native dances and everything. I felt like that was very powerful because it was a very big symbol of respect. I feel like at our [482Forward] conferences we can start off doing that… it really stepped us out on the right foot for the whole conference.”

Gonzales reflected on just two of over 100 convenings, panels, tours and gatherings during this year’s FMFP programming. It was impossible to make it to everything, and also impossible nonetheless to miss the gems each speaker, presenter and facilitator had in store. 

“When black men are ready to embrace black trans women, then we can have a conversation about liberation.” This was one of the many jewels author and researcher Bettina L. Love dropped during the opening plenary. Rios-Hernandez spoke about the impact Love’s words had on her.

“The way that she spoke really impacted me because she made people feel… like they didn’t have to be ashamed of their own experiences, because she wasn’t ashamed when speaking of them. So I think when I want to talk about my own experiences, I feel like I want to make people feel comfortable… because many of us have gone through it.”

Rios-Hernandez did speak about her experiences, along with PIE Director Nate Mullen;  educator, organizer and writer, Matthew Homrich-Knieling and Emily Gonzales during our workshop, “Organizing to Humanize Schooling in Detroit.” 

The workshop opened with a centering activity where presenters read “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver to bring participants’ attention into the room. After an overview of workshop presenters and their work in Detroit, we moved into a space of inquiry, asking questions like “Does school make room for our humanity?” A group discussion led to Mullen’s introduction of his own schooling experience in Detroit. From there, we hosted a dynamic panel of people from various vantage points of education: High school student Tay, educator Marisol Teachworth and Homrich-Knieling talked about their passions, hopes and work in education and answered questions from attendees. These attendees, by the way, were all from Detroit! Homrich-Knieling reflected on the workshop:

“So basically, a bunch of folx from Detroit went to Minneapolis and we all ended up in the same room to talk educational justice and liberation, which was beautiful and hilarious. It felt so good to be in community with everyone, to learn about transformative work happening across the city, and to share our experiences working to humanize schooling in Detroit… Even though so much is not working in our schools, there are so many communities… in Detroit creating opportunities for young folx to learn, to create, to collaborate with adults meaningfully, to fight for justice & freedom.”

In fact, “Getting Free, Imagining Freedom” was the overall theme of the conference. Seems like we hit the mark. 

Check out some views of the conference from our vantage point: