Dear SEMIS Coalition Members,
Happy Winter Solstice! As you gear up to enjoy this busy season of celebration, we hope you are also finding some space for slowness, quiet, and renewal. Before our team disperses for our own time of rest and reflection, we’re excited to share with you a collection of some of the stories we are celebrating from the past year.
For me, a story from this year that is particularly worthy of celebrating is a growing conversation across our Coalition around cultivating thriving and resilient place-based education ecosystems. It’s probably no surprise that the word ‘ecosystem’ gets used pretty often here at SEMIS, so let me start by defining what we mean in this context. In the ecological sense of the word, a thriving ecosystem is a diverse community of plants, animals, water, and land whose reciprocal relationships support an abundance of life. A thriving place-based education ecosystem shares many of those qualities. It is diverse, including members such as teachers, administrators, students, community partners, building staff, and families, and it is stronger when each member of the community has the resources and support they need and shares in responsibility for support of the whole.
Over the past 14 or so months, small groups of educators from across the SEMIS Coalition have been convening to discuss what thriving place-based education ecosystems look like, and what they take to grow and maintain. In late 2024, 9 teachers and administrators from across Washtenaw, Lenawee, and Monroe counties met over a couple of weeks to discuss and reflect on what was necessary to support exemplary place-based educators and administrators. At the end of the convenings, they found the most valuable part wasn’t necessarily what they came up with, but rather the conversations themselves, and especially the opportunity to have conversations across different schools and different roles. You can read more about that effort here. Based on encouragement from that initial group, and with generous support from the Bosch Community Fund, the SEMIS Coalition developed another set of convenings for this year- but with a few new additions! First, this year’s conversation group is team-based. Each of the four participating schools will bring at least one administrator and teacher to each of our conversations. Over the course of a year, this cohort of around 15 teachers, building principals, instructional coaches, and district administrators will engage in multiple conversations – some of which will prioritize opportunities to share experiences across roles and schools, some that will create dedicated space for administrators to talk with other administrators and teachers to talk with other teachers, and some that will give school teams time to reflect with each other about their own school’s ecosystem. Each team will also have an opportunity to design and facilitate a conversation with other members of their school or district to bring back not just what they learned through this process, but also the practice of being in conversation about the health of their place-based ecosystem together.
While this year’s cohort only held their first conversation about a month ago, the group has already been so generous in its sharing of stories and expertise and in celebrating each other. As we began to develop a vision for a thriving place-based ecosystem in our first session, it also became clear how many different roles there are in the ecosystem – and how that diversity of perspectives and needs, while a little daunting, could result in a stronger network of support for place-based schools and educators. Over the next five months, we’ll continue to learn with and from each other, deepen our understanding of what it takes to support these thriving place-based ecosystems, and practice being an ecosystem of support ourselves as we all become stronger advocates for learning through place. We’ll be sure to share more stories along the way!
We wish you all a safe and warm holiday season with your ecosystems of support. See you in 2026!
In Partnership,
Anna Balzer
Photo descriptions:
Top of Page: A cohort of teachers, principals, and district administrators discuss action areas for growing a place-based education ecosystem at the SEMIS Coalition Dinner & Design event in September 2024. (Photo Credit: SEMIS Coalition)
Above: Participants provide feedback on the ‘Portrait of a Place-Based Education Ecosystem’ at the SEMIS Coalition Summer Institute in July 2024. (Photo Credit: Lon Horwedel)
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