Detroit Future Schools Youth Launch “DFS Ideas” Campaign

Two weeks ago Detroit Teachers closed 88 Detroit schools as a protest of inhumane school conditions. Last week students walked of several DPS Schools in support of protesting teachers. It's no secret, our school system needs serious change. At Detroit Future Schools we believe that this change should have Detroit’s young people at its center.

The Out-of-School Project (OSP) is an afterschool program that brings together young people from all over the city – including Detroit Public Schools, charter schools, private schools, alternative schools, and colleges. In this program, students create media that inserts youth voice into the conversation about the challenges and opportunities facing Detroit’s public education system.

We are excited to announce the launch of #DFSIdeas, a research project and social media campaign led by young people in our Out-of-School Project. These youth will collect and share stories from Detroit students who are thriving despite obstacles in Detroit’s school system such as high teacher turnover, poor access to transportation, lack of classroom materials and resources, unhealthy food, etc. We hope to bring to light the many ways in which students are responding to these problems and their unique visions for change within the system.

Over the next six months we will conduct interviews, identify broad themes across the stories we collect, and create a media project such as a video or blog that shares the big ideas and lessons from our research. We will present this work at public events such as the Allied Media Conference in order to uplift the youth perspective around Detroit schools and reform.  Ultimately, we hope this work will inspire and inform future OSP projects that provide youth-led solutions to problems within Detroit’s school system. See how you can participate below!

Tell us Your #DFSIdeas

Are you a young person in Detroit?  We want to hear what being a student in Detroit schools is like.

Are you always looking to switch schools because your school doesn't work for you or was closed? Do you struggle to get to school everyday because of transportation issues? Do you get up really early to travel to the ‘burbs to get to a “good school”? Do you feel like nobody cares about your education?

How are you dealing with the problems you face in your schools everyday? What are the things you want to change and how would you change them?

We’re looking for Detroit youth who want to share their stories with us! If you have a story and would like us to interview you, please email DFS@alliedmedia.org

You can also send us your ideas on twitter, facebook or instagram using the hashtag #DFSideas

Want more info?

Email us at DFS@alliedmedia.org

Follow us: Twitter: @DFStweets Facebook.com/DetroitFutureSchools

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?