FEB 21-23, 2014: The Detroit Future Schools Rida Institute

From February 21-23, 2014, the Rida Institute will offer a three day crash-course in re-imagining what is possible within our schools. The question "what is the purpose of education?" frames the Institute, as participants explore the educational theories of Paolo Freire, Jeff Duncan-Andrade, Eleanor Duckworth,James Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs and others.

THE RIDA INSTITUTE

Are you a K-12 classroom teacher with visions of fostering transformative education in your classroom, but drowning in the day-to-day of federal policies, school bureaucracy and individual student needs?

Do you find yourself asking, "Where do I even begin to fix things?"

Are you someone who works with teachers – either as an administrator, a consultant, or support staff? Do you find yourself wondering where to begin when tasked with helping teachers think through their practice?

Are you looking for a way to reinvent, reenergize, and re-imagine teaching and learning?

The Rida Institute will feature hands-on training and discussion, and plenaries with local and national education specialists.

WHEN: Friday, February 21 - Sunday, February 23, 2014 WHERE: Allied Media Projects | 4126 Third St. | Detroit, MI WHO: K-12 instructors, administrators, support staff

Seats are limited. Click here to apply today!

The deadline to apply is December 15, 2013 January 6, 2013.

Registration ranges from $150 for individuals to $500 for institutions sending a representative. The cost for institutions is used to subsidize the cost for individual teachers paying their own way both locally and nationally.

There are affordable housing options in Detroit. Please indicate your interest viathe application and we will follow-up with your interest with more details.

THE RIDA CLASSROOM

Central to Detroit Future Schools is a unique framework called the DFS Rida Framework that embodies the "action-reflection praxis" articulated by Paolo Freire, and is inspired by the the study of effective practices in urban classrooms, "Gangsta, Wanksta, Rida" by Jeff Duncan-Andrade. As Duncan-Andrade writes in the article, "'Rida' is a popular cultural term that refers to people who can be counted on during times of extreme duress. The term is often referenced in hip-hop with the expression, 'ride or die', meaning that Ridas are people who would sooner die than let their people down." Throughout the article, Duncan-Andrade continues to articulate the "five pillars of effective practice in the Rida's classroom." These pillars include: a critically conscious purpose, duty, preparation, a Socratic sensibility, and trust.

This research and these pillars are what have informed the development of the DFS Rida Institute. The Rida Framework allows participants to gain the type of perspective a Rida teacher would need to authentically serve their students and community. Schools traditionally demand that teachers begin to think about their work by first looking at their content and state standards that are usually far removed from the lived realities of students. As a curriculum development tool, this framework requires that participants first deeply reflect on their contexts and instructional beliefs, demands and goals in order to give school content a critical sense of place and purpose. From this balcony view, participants then articulate practices (action) that will yield desired/outlined outcomes within their classrooms which they will document and evaluate via pre-determined metrics (reflection).

The Rida Framework facilitates participants outlining the following elements as they relate to their teaching:

Context → Purpose → Vision → Principles → Skills → Practices → Content → Metrics

Moving from theory to practice, participants will use the DFS Rida Framework to chart a path towards actualizing transformative education in their own classrooms and schools. DFS defines transformative education as the thing that happens when teachers, students, and school community members are mutually engaged in the work of becoming more fully human. Participants will leave the Rida Institute with the instructional practices, evaluation tools, and network of support necessary to bring this definition to life.

Click here to apply to the DFS Rida Institure!

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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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