Dear SEMIS Coalition,
This time of year, the SEMIS Coalition planning team gets to do one of our favorite things – read and hear stories from educators about how place-based learning shaped their classrooms and communities over the past year. These ‘Shared Stories’ as they’re known among teachers and community partners, tell us not only about what lessons, field experiences, and action projects took place across Coalition schools, but also what particular ‘ah-ha’ moments educators, students, and community partners had together throughout the year. While these Shared Stories themselves are not the subject for this month’s blog (though don’t be surprised if they show up again soon!), it turns out that they are rooted in a practice that has been a part of the Coalition’s approach for many years – and one that ties directly to the next chapter in the SEMIS Coalition story I’ve been sharing here this year.
As the last installment in our story explored, the original design and approach of the SEMIS Coalition was based on a deep philosophy of EcoJustice Education. As the Coalition launched into its work with educators and community partners, though, a tension emerged between the rigor of the pedagogical philosophy and the realities of practical application. This month, I had the incredible pleasure of sitting down with Becca Nielsen and Ethan Lowenstein – two names that are likely synonymous with the SEMIS Coalition for many readers – to hear more about this chapter and how the Coalition navigated these tensions.
Becca Nielsen was among the original members of the SEMIS Coalition steering committee in her role as an Education Manager with the National Wildlife Federation and would become its Program Director in 2009. When we met in late June, she remembered sitting in Rebecca Martusewicz’s house many years ago with poster paper covering her refrigerator and white boards scattered around, watching the shape of the Coalition begin to emerge. “The basic structure came together very early,” she recalled. “We were getting people ready for the EcoJustice conference in March, which would then lead to a Summer Institute, with two days in the classroom and two in the field.” While she remembered the passion and energy of the steering committee fondly as the vision began to take shape, she also noted that a defining part of these early days was the difficulty of upholding a visionary model, while also making it work in the real, and often challenging, contexts of K-12 classrooms. “A couple of schools left early on because they had too many other initiatives going on and SEMIS was not a ‘canned’ initiative they could easily implement,” she remembered. Other teachers, she recalled, struggled to see themselves or their instructional work in the challenging, and often deeply personal, concepts of EcoJustice. To effectively navigate the gap between theory and practice, the SEMIS Coalition needed to be better able to translate these big ideas into the language being spoken in classrooms and communities.
For Ethan, who joined the steering committee in 2009 and became the Coalition’s Director in 2011, the most effective strategy for bridging that gap was finding ways to gather and tell stories of powerful place-based learning. “For many years,” Ethan remembers, “there were not rich examples of rigorous, powerful place-based learning. That’s not to say rich place-based education didn’t exist,” he explained, “but the stories had not yet been harvested, and had not yet been thought of as part of a shared identity among a coalition.”
To begin the work of finding and sharing these stories, the Coalition began looking for locations of dense place-based wisdom and bringing those practitioners into deeper community. “The narrative of SEMIS is not that we came out of nowhere,” Ethan shared. “Our Coalition came from existing strengths in the community, in Detroit, in decolonized zones with longstanding grassroots efforts about survival and thriving.”
These early practitioners came from many backgrounds – from Malik Yakini, Mama Fabayo Manzira, and other educators at the Nsoroma Institute, to deeply committed community educators like Bart Eddy and Candyce Sweda at Detroit Community High School and their resilience-focused neighbors in Brightmoor, and even community partners like MI Sea Grant. “Part of our purposeful strategic approach,” Ethan recalls “was also to invite veteran place-based classroom teachers into the Coalition that had certain core practices – but who in some cases were ‘lone wolf’ practitioners rather than teams – because we wanted to get a critical capacity of wisdom infused into the Coalition.”
This critical capacity of wisdom was essential to build a stronger narrative of powerful place-based learning stories, but also to allow these educators to reflect on their practice, to be in Coalition with each other, and to help the Coalition learn its way forward. As these shared stories and practices took root in the Coalition, the next wave of place-based practice evolved. As Ethan remembers it, educators in this next wave weren’t necessarily veteran place-based teachers, but were educators with a strong commitment to community and a willingness to take a leap of faith with the Coalition – teachers like Amy Lazarowicz, Lisa Lipscomb, and June Clora at Neinas Elementary, Tracy Durandetto at Hope of Detroit, Tracey Marchyok at Ann Arbor Learning Community, Ramona Gligor and then Chad Segrist at Detroit Institute of Technology, and community partner organizations like Matrix Theatre, the Detroit Youth Energy Squad, the Greening of Detroit, the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center, Southwest Detroit Environmental Vision, the University of Michigan Dearborn, and the Huron River Watershed Council (to name a few, while lamenting my inability to recognize them all). The early Coalition members jumped in alongside SEMIS to learn how to bring place-based learning to new spaces.
“When we look back at the artifacts of Coalition practices and place-based learning we gathered during this period, they show iterations of what we were trying to do from the beginning. Initial inquiry involves throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks,” Ethan recalls with his signature grin. “And a lot started to stick at this point.”
These trailblazing educators soon began to form dense clusters of place-based teaching at their schools, most often when they had some support of building and district administrators, and most powerfully when there was a strong teacher-leader who could navigate the politics of the school and help to coordinate school efforts. In Neinas Elementary School in Detroit, liberatory space created for science teaching by district administrators like Alycia Meriweather, were met by curious and creative teachers and students and a network of strong community partners (such as Greening of Detroit, UofM Dearborn, Matrix Theatre Company, and Southwest Detroit Environmental Vision). With the support of Steering Committee members like Gloria Rivera and dedicated support from Becca in the classroom, teachers and community partners at Neinas became more familiar with bringing students out of the building and into the neighborhood to do community observation walks. Ethan remembers Leanne Andrus, a 1st grade teacher of 15 years, remarking that after her first walk with students, they only observed the human-made environment around them, even though the school is surrounded by plenty of green spaces. “That was her EcoJustice moment. She realized kids are growing up with this illusion of disembeddedness to the point where they don’t even see the nature around them.”
Eventually, Neinas students’ connection to their place would lead them to conduct a ‘tire sweep’ in their community – an action project idea and wisdom that had migrated from another early cluster of teachers at Hope of Detroit Academy. Hope of Detroit was one of the schools Shug Brandell had worked with as a part of the Coalition of Essential Schools, and already had a whole-school model that worked well with place-based learning, Gloria Rivera also had deep relationships with the school and with grassroots community groups and non-profits in Southwest Detroit. In 2008, teacher Tracy Durandetto and her students were studying a unit on brownfields and groundwater when on a community walk they noticed a vacant piece of land where tires were being illegally dumped. Students planned a ‘tire sweep’ to clean up the tires with Southwest Detroit Environmental Vision and worked with Cass Community Social Services, a non-profit organization fighting poverty by providing basic services, job training, to learn how to convert old tires to mud mats and provide jobs for Detroiters experiencing homelessness in the process. Tire sweeps soon became an important EcoJustice civic action project both schools would carry out along with community partners and elected officials for many years.
While the stories from this pivotal moment of the Coalition are numerous and endlessly inspiring, Ethan offered a word of warning in our conversation. “While it’s awesome to tell the stories of student projects and results, there’s a real danger of ignoring how critical the teacher/community educator learning is.” Which brings us to the final ingredient to success in this chapter we’ll cover (for now): the rituals of storytelling, reflection, and deep learning that were emerging among and across educators in the Coalition. Ethan remembers how generative this moment was for the Coalition. “We cooked up so much in terms of rituals, facilitation protocols, and routines.” At professional development days, institutes, and other events, people were allowed space to get to know each other and discover their strengths. The Coalition began to shift its idea of partnership from one of service delivery to one of mutual transformation where roles that began with only a loose definition, became more customized to better meet the needs of the project and of the learners.
Becca also remembers the practice of coaching growing out of this moment. “Our own approach became more inquiry-based and less instructive,” she shared. It was through these emerging relationships with Neinas, Hope of Detroit, and other early Coalition schools that Becca’s role as a coach and program director within SEMIS emerged. “There was a need to provide communication and coordination within SEMIS and between community partners and schools, as well as on-site curriculum support and planning in classrooms – not just support for field experiences.” Becca said. “Our focus on organic relationships between team members and educators allowed us to ask questions like ‘where are you starting,’ ‘where are you now,’ and ‘what is important to you and your students?’ so that we could create a bridge to the EcoJustice concept or root of an issue.” Becca emphasized this approach to leadership as one in which you look for the core of what someone loves and what they care about and then connect it to the EcoJustice concepts that might not be as familiar to them. This approach, she said, modeled what SEMIS was all about – an ethic of care and connectedness, and an ethic of responsibility – and it was also what began to hold everyone together.
As I listened to Becca and Ethan’s stories about this chapter and reflected on them as I wrote this blog, I couldn’t help but remember all of my own feelings the first time I came to a SEMIS Coalition event in the fall of 2014 – feelings of love, of genuine curiosity and care from other Coalition members, feelings of belonging. These are the things place-based education seeks to stir up in all of us, and most importantly our young people. They are also feelings that can be challenged when stories of fear, exclusion, and scarcity dominate our broader cultural conversations. So, we will continue to tell stories here of belonging and to reflect on how the SEMIS Coalition, its educators, community partners, and young people persist in bringing those stories and those feelings to life. And we hope you’ll continue to join us. Check back next month for some of the stories we’ve gathered from educators and young people this past year and the impacts they’re having in our communities today.
In Partnership,
Anna
Director, SEMIS Coalition | abalzer1@emich.edu
Neinas Elementary students on a Great Lakes Education Program boat in Lake Erie.
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