Dear SEMIS Coalition,
Though I’m certain I’m not the first, let me be among the many to welcome you into this new year and this new quarter century!
If you are like me, you may be taking time to reflect on your intentions for this upcoming year. And, if you are like me, you may also be giving some extra weight to your intentions this time around, given the uncertainty this new year may bring to our climate, to education, and to our communities at a national and global scale. My own reflection on this uncertainty has affirmed my belief that meaningful learning and transformative change will grow most successfully from relationships – and that these types of relationships can emerge from our connection to place. So, this month, I thought I’d share some of the SEMIS Coalition intentions – and opportunities – to deepen our region’s relationship to place and with each other in 2025.
One enduring way the SEMIS Coalition has supported deeper relationships is to hold space for our members to interrogate and expand the ways we think about our relationship to and history of our place. In the past few months, I experienced tremendous growth reading and participating in discussions around several books through the SEMIS Coalition’s Indigenous Ways of Knowing initiative, including ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ by Robin Wall Kimmerer and ‘Fresh Banana Leaves’ by Jessica Hernandez. Discussing these shared texts with other Coalition members has helped me reflect on the ways settler colonialism has impacted my own sense of history and my relationship with place and have powerful ways of relating with human and non-human members of our community. This year, we’re excited to keep exploring ‘Fresh Banana Leaves’ as a part of the Indigenous Ways of Knowing reading group and hope you’ll consider joining us!
Another intention for 2025 is to continue to expand the table for conversations about place-based education in our region. We are excited to build on the powerful conversations we had through a series of ‘Place-Based Education Ecosystem’ conversations last fall and to explore how the SEMIS Coalition can support more collaboration between teachers, principals, district administrators, and community partners within their own districts and across districts in Southeast Michigan. We’re also looking forward to bringing place-based professional learning to more teachers and administrators in our region through our Eco-STEM Place Based Education 101 workshop on February 8th (registration is open now!). We are also looking forward to continuing our ‘Youth Voice’ blog series and to creating new opportunities for young people to drive inquiry and project decision-making through a new phase of the Climate Resilience from the Youth Up program and for young people to connect more deeply with each other at our Community Forum in May.
And finally, an evergreen intention is to spend even more time getting to know and building community with this Coalition and with our broader networks of place-based education advocates. Whether it’s catching up over coffee, learning together at our upcoming Winter Professional Development day, celebrating our young people at our Annual Community Forum, or – an opportunity I’m especially excited about – gathering with our Coalition and place-based leaders from around the world at the Place-Based Education Conference at Eastern Michigan University in the fall, we are deeply looking forward to partnering with, learning from, and continuing to be inspired by all of you this year.
In Partnership,
Anna
Director, SEMIS Coalition | abalzer1@emich.edu
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