Dear SEMIS Coalition members,
I hope everyone has been able to enjoy their favorite parts of summer in Southeast Michigan and to find time for rest, reflection, and rejuvenation amidst all of your other activities these past few months! As you’ve read in other parts of this newsletter, the SEMIS Coalition- including our planning team, community partners, and several teachers- has been pouring a lot of energy and love into preparing for our Summer Institute, which was held the last week of July. As a first-time participant in a SEMIS Coalition Summer Institute, I was blown away by how engaging, inspiring, and deeply rooted each day of the 5-day experience was.
We spent time immersing ourselves in biologically and culturally diverse places across Southeast Michigan, heard and shared stories of these places and others that are important to us, and challenged dominant educational structures by adopting new ‘ways of seeing’ for the week, such as ecojustice education, outdoor and interdisciplinary learning, and youth voice. The week was a testament to the power of place-based learning, as I believe we all left feeling more deeply connected and, at least in some small way, transformed.
Amidst preparing for this incredible week, though, the SEMIS Coalition planning team also carved out some important time for reflection and retreat, making space to deepen our own practices in being a resilient community. In our retreat time this summer, we also spent time refining the language for the SEMIS Coalition’s updated Vision Statement and Guiding Principles. The updates to these foundational documents have been underway for several years and have included contributions from across the Coalition’s current and former membership. I am very excited to share that, during our retreat, the planning team was able to finalize the updated language and later was able to share the new documents with participants in the Summer Institute. Today, we have published these updated statements on our website and on our Facebook page!
These living documents will be important texts for our Coalition as we continue to define and redefine who we are as a network, to provide greater transparency in how we make decisions together, and will be a starting point for inviting our broader communities into conversation with us about the ways we approach this work. Expect to see pieces of the Vision and Guiding Principles woven into our work throughout the year, but for now, we invite you to read and reflect with us on these updated statements as a way of recentering and refining how you think about your roles as a place-based educator. I welcome your thoughts and reflections on these updates anytime and look forward to living into these principles and this vision for the future with all of you in the coming year.
In partnership,
Anna Balzer
Director, SEMIS Coalition | abalzer1@emich.edu
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