Expression Through Line

Centering Care in the Classroom

It is imperative that we all prioritize care, connection and wellbeing. Join us in bringing this process into your class or learning space.

Expression Through Line  is a wonderful activity to playfully create space to check in on students’ individual and collective wellbeing. Through an approachable medium students use art to process and express their emotions. It is a deceptively simple lesson that helps students name and normalize their emotions while also teaching students how to reflect on what art is trying to invoke.

Bonus: you don't need to be an art teacher to make it happen!

Centering Care with The Boggs School:

“Its wild you can do that with just one line!”

— Boggs student

This lesson was born during our latest AIR partnership. We teamed up with our friends at the James and Grace Lee Boggs School to deliver our media-based programming based on the theme: Community as Care. We embarked on delivering the AIR program virtually as we all navigated uncharted territory surrounded by grief, loneliness and a tumultuous social and political context as COVID reached new heights in the darkness of winter. Lead Teaching Artist, Cyrah Dardas, focused less on “creating” and more on cultivating a virtual space centered on care through the use of art and media. She developed the lesson Expression Through Line to create the space for Boggs students to share their emotions through the use of art and normalize talking about our emotions with each other. As we continue to navigate the collective trauma, change and ongoing grief of the pandemic, we invite you to center care and connection with young people using the Expression Through Line lesson!

PIE in 2020: Facing Change

The transition from one year to the next is always a time of reflection, and 2020 is incredibly ripe for such a practice. As we look back on the last twelve months of relentless change, it's mind boggling to think of where we have been and with so much loss, what we have created.

January 2020, PIE Board Retreat

While navigating the uncertainty and grief of COVID-19, we answered what felt like an intuitive call to tap into our resilience and innate aliveness. As a team, we moved with each other in new ways, both interpersonally and programmatically. We produced new resources and media that met the needs of the moment for both ourselves and our community. 

We are grateful to be in relationship with people and spaces with whom we can create and change together.

Even at distance, we tried on new types partnerships: We worked with Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute to write a Guide to Emergent Strategy Immersions and with Urban Neighborhood Initiatives to support their youth development programs.  

In 2020, we’ve seen PIE change as an organization as well. We invested time and energy to effectively transition our programming online. Our mission both broadened and sharpened from humanizing schooling to humanizing learning. We set yet a new standard for putting out our media projects. With all of this pivoting, we wrap up this year reflecting on what guided us through:  

COMMUNITY AS CARE

In 2020, community care has been our north star. We felt this as a team, relying on weekly meetings to check-in and be together despite our [social] distance. Our journey with Rida Institute educators exemplified this over the year as well, as we created a slack community and moved to gathering online. Leaning on our relationships -- old and new -- we remembered that we were in this together. 

“I believe art is an important part of social justice because its a way to communicate a message without saying a word”

— Ely Vasquez, 482Forward Youth

IMAGINING ANEW

The past 9 months have required us to examine and rethink our work. We must be the change needed to humanize learning, but we must see the change first. We must dream possibilities into reality. Art and media making are key to inspiring the creative imagination needed to do so. Our work with 482Forward Youth Collective and Alternatives for Girls are prime examples of what imagining police-free, student-centered schools with nourishing resources for humans could look like. Return to some of our 2020 media below:

POSSIBILITY THROUGH COLLABORATION

2020 has reiterated our inherent need for connection and our sacred interdependence. It was through collaboration between PIE team members and with community partners that we experienced a profound sense of possibility in this moment of uncertainty. From working with our committed Artist-in-Residence partners to planting seeds at the Allied Media Conference, we found that our work was not only still possible, but vital to managing all that 2020 has brought to our lives. Without our partners reminding us that we are our own greatest resource, we could never evolve as we have thus far.  See some of our favorite (r)evolutionary moments from 2020 below:

TEAM CHANGES AND CELEBRATIONS

Our team continues to change and evolve in beautiful ways. This year, we welcomed Kiarra Ambrose as our first ever Rida Institute Facilitation Fellow. Kiarra supports Rida programming and participants in a role we hope will evolve and multiply as we seek to train and mentor more compassionate, purpose-driven educators. Cyrah Dardas, a teaching artist of 2 years at PIE, was promoted to Lead Teaching Artist with our Artist in Residence program. Check out some of the media projects she has led here. We also had the pleasure of sending PIE media intern, Tulani Pryor, off to begin a Master’s program in the University of Michigan School of Information! And it is with congratulations and sorrow that we say bye for now to Erin Allen, who will depart from her role as PIE Communications and Fundraising Coordinator at the end of the year. She will remain a close friend to PIE, as she continues to forge her way in the world of radio and podcasting as the producer of Stateside with Michigan Radio. We are overjoyed for Erin and can't wait to hear her creations on the radio waves.

forging ahead to 2021

This year has been unpredictable and flat out difficult. We’ve been reminded to stay human and tender, to lean into what makes us feel alive in order to stay alive, to create and evolve and to rest. As we look ahead to 2021, PIE’s 10-year anniversary, strangely it feels right that 2020 has been so packed. It’s set us up for reaching even further back to 2011, when Detroit Future Schools first began imagining the radical future of learning. 

Onward with love, 

People of PIE

What are you planting? What are you harvesting? A Recap on Allied Media Conference 2020

PIE Special Advisor Nate Mullen supporting the Visionary Organizing for Education Justice network gathering.

Last month, PIE participated in the long anticipated, 21st Allied Media Conference (AMC). And we are still swooning over the profound connections we made with people in education from across the globe.  Like so many 2020 gatherings, AMC was virtual this year and admission was available at no cost. This changed the accessibility and security practices of the conference, but it also created space for dozens more session participants than PIE has ever seen at AMC.

GATHERING FOR EDUCATION JUSTICE

“I thought I was already fighting for language justice in my classroom. But I’m realizing I have a long way to go with that.”

— Reflection from a network gathering educator

We were honored to join the Visionary Organizing for Education Justice network gathering, including helping to co-facilitate a discussion on school abolition. Over the three-day gathering, we connected with over 100 conference goers, listening and sharing our work of humanizing learning. 

We are grateful to Julia Cuneo, Matt Homrich-Knieling, Savannah Gale, Kaitlin Popielarz and N’Kenge Robertson for organizing the gathering space. We were in awe of the dynamic speakers, including David Stovall and Bettina Love -- it was great to see them again after Free Minds Free People last year.  They were joined by Dr. Aja Reynolds from Wayne State University who reminded us how the  dehumanizing conditions in schools affect not only youth, but teachers and other adults in and adjacent to schools.

And we joined many others in being transformed by Dr. April Baker Bell’s presentation on racial and linguistic justice. One attendee commented, “I thought I was already fighting for language justice in my classroom. But I’m realizing I have a long way to go.” Sharing space - albeit virtual - with educators of all stripes can show us so much about ourselves. 

TOWARD SCHOOL ABOLITION

On Saturday, after the network gathering, we co-facilitated a conversation with Detroit Area Youth Uniting Michigan (DAYUM). The session was called New Approaches to School Abolition, and Nate opened by reminding us that humanizing learning will not happen quickly, and is worth the journey.

“This is a journey - urgency is what gets in the way of us doing this work effectively.”

- Nate Mullen, PIE Special Advisor

Next up was Dr. David Stovall, who introduced the concept of school abolition as a tool for prioritizing youth- and human-centered learning.  

Dr. David Stovall during the New Approaches to School Abolition session

“Schooling is the orderly compliance that you are falsely rewarded for. The logics of the school are the logics of the prison. Are we prepared to abolish school as a concept that is rooted in the marginalization of youth?”

— Dr. David Stovall

And the varied experiences of DAYUM youth contextualized school abolition. Brooke Solomon echoed much of what PIE Teaching Artist Cyrah Dardas expressed in her interview about centering youth voice. 

“A world of school abolition looks like actually being able to be a kid […] School abolition is centered around the distinction between school and education. ”

— Jaanaki Radhakrishnan, DAYUM Youth

Brooke spoke about being seen as a model student by educators and administrators because of her leadership and good grades -- that is until she became a DAYUM activist for school and education reform. Then, her school leadership began to target her with criticism and sometimes punishment, revealing to her the punitive practices that permeate many schools:

In school, there's always a target on your back because school is prison.

- Brooke Solomon, DAYUM youth

And when asked what a world of school abolition would look like, DAYUM youth Jaanaki Radhakrishnan said it plain: “actually being able to be a kid.”

PLANTING AND HARVESTING

As we look back on this year’s AMC, we are so grateful for these guiding questions and how they framed our week and weekend. We sowed seeds of relationship and connection with educators from all over at the Visionary Organizing for Education Justice network gathering. And simultaneously, we harvested the fruit of relationships we’ve built over the years with DAYUM and session organizers.  

And we were affirmed by the beautiful offerings throughout the conference, showing us that the answer to Stovall’s question is yes.

He asked, Are we prepared to abolish school as a concept that is rooted in the marginalization of youth? 

Yes, we are all bringing the future through by the planting and harvesting we do every day -- on the micro and macro levels -- to humanize education. Thank you for sharing space with us at AMC 2020. We can’t wait for 2022!