Dear SEMIS Coalition Members,
I’m a big fan of Octavia Butler. I know that’s a strange way to welcome the new year and to start a blog that doesn’t typically engage in a lot of literary critique, but I promise I’ll connect it all. When I first started reading Octavia’s books, I was drawn to her ability to take a pressing societal issue and help us look at it through a fictional, often futuristic, lens – turning the issue just enough for us to see, and feel, its impacts more clearly. Today, I’m even more drawn to her familiarity with and fluency in the realm of change. In her two-part series, Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, Octavia centers the idea that change is constant, and inevitable, but also something that we can both adapt to and shape.
We often talk about education as a way to prepare young people for ‘a changing world’. It’s broadly understood that change – especially technological change – is happening at such a rate that we aren’t able to predict the types of jobs young people might have or even how they’ll interact with those jobs and each other. Other types of change – climate change, political change, economic change – can feel even more unknowable. I know I’m not alone in feeling the bigness, and even the fear, of that ‘unknowable’ change, especially in this moment in our country and in our world. But education can, and should, help us (educators and young people alike) not just respond and adapt to the realities of our changing landscape but also provide us with tools and experiences to understand and, as Octavia would put it, shape that change.
In place-based learning, educators engage a lot with the idea of change and young people’s agency within it. Sometimes this is as straightforward as observing changes in a place – taking a walk through the same place in different seasons, to document and get curious about how plants and animals adjust their own behaviors in rhythm with those seasons. Other times, young people might be exploring change across larger periods of time and broader geographical areas, such as investigating how housing policy across generations shaped gentrification in their community. As educators work to help young people see themselves as connected to these changing places, communities, and relationships, they also invite young people to consider their responsibility to use what they have learned to shape future change – such as by running a food waste reduction campaign after analyzing how much methane is produced by food waste in their cafeteria. They also encourage young people to connect what they’re doing on their school grounds with policies and practices in their broader communities – such as by working with their city to select the best trees for the local ecosystem to distribute at their annual Arbor Day celebration.
Photos above are from Community Forum presentations, from left to right: Washtenaw Technical Middle College – EcoProject Observations; Lincoln High School – Gentrification in Ypsilanti; Early College Alliance – Food Waste and Climate Change; Wylie Elementary – Arbor Day Tree Distribution.
Photo at top of page: Students from the James and Grace Lee Boggs School on a field trip in the woods.
In the face of the scale of change we see (and feel) when we read the news or talk with our neighbors, these place-based investigations and actions may seem small. But here, I turn to another favorite writer, and fellow student of Octavia Butler, adrienne maree brown. In her book Emergent Strategy, adrienne uses the ecological and mathematical concept of fractals to explain how change is shaped. She argues that these complex and self-similar patterns in nature help us understand that, like fractals, what we practice at a small scale reverberates to the largest scale and sets the pattern for the whole system. In short, what we do and how we engage in our own lives – including our relationships with each other and our places – matters. Furthermore, she argues that these local, embodied experiences with change are essential for shaping broader change. “Until we have some sense of how to live our solutions locally,” she writes, “we won’t be successful at implementing a just governance system regionally, nationally, or globally”.
As we grapple with the bigness of challenges in our society this year, we will turn our attention (and this blog) to how we, as a Coalition of educators, young people, and community partners, are shaping change within our educational institutions and our places through place-based education. We’ll explore how place-based learning intersects with issues like civic engagement and democracy, community resilience, literacy, the future of work, and even AI. Through conversations with educators, community members, and young people, we’ll discuss the actions we are taking in our own spheres of influence and how they connect to the things we see at the national and global levels. And just like we do in place-based learning, we’ll ask questions about our places and our responsibilities to those places and to each other, especially in this time of significant and consequential change.
We look forward to continuing to be in this conversation and community with you and to shape change together in the coming year.
In Partnership,
Anna Balzer
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