Hello SEMIS Coalition!
There are several points every year that bring the word ‘transformation’ to mind for me, but none so readily as fall. Watching the trees transform from bright greens to even brighter shades of red, orange, and yellow; watching fields high with corn be harvested and transform back into low, rolling landscapes; even watching the young people in my community bundle up a little more for the playground and get called home a little earlier as the daylight grows a little shorter each day. It’s a reminder that our places are in a constant state of transformation – and so are we.
The SEMIS Coalition mission calls for transformational changes to K-12 and higher education so that all living systems may thrive in sustainable, healthy, and just communities. This transformation is ongoing work, and can be slow work – and that means it is often challenging work. There are many demands placed on the education system and on educators themselves, and too often, limits to the resources needed to sustain all of those demands and meet the intrinsic needs of learners.
But the SEMIS Coalition, I feel, has also uncovered what can support and guide us through the challenges of intentional transformation – being a Coalition. Specifically, as our guiding principles describe, being a coalition that is rooted in collaboration, belonging, and a diversity of relationships, members, and generations in the community. I have seen this principle in practice in many ways in the past few months as the SEMIS Coalition Director. During the Summer Institute, we traveled across our region to see and hear directly from our member teachers and partners how they are navigating complexity through relationship – including building relationships with school staff to help maintain and expand a native garden for student-led inquiry, or bringing young people and their families into conversation with industry owners reducing the impacts of air pollution from nearby factories. Additionally, the series of briefings that Dr. Nigora Erkaeva is leading around Indigenous Ways of Knowing have challenged participants to acknowledge the deep interconnectedness of all things and to evaluate how our own ways of knowing might be blinding us to our interconnectedness. The power of relationships also showed up in a set of conversations and activities that explored a ‘portrait of a place-based ecosystem’ with teachers and administrators from across our region. Over several sessions, we dove more deeply into what is needed to support a flourishing place-based education ecosystem and the participants found that the very act of engaging in dialogue across roles and across districts was actually what they found to be most transformational.
When we practice navigating transformational change in and through coalition, relationships, and conversation, we can lean on, challenge, and support each other as we co-create ways of learning and being that are just and liberated for all.
Throughout this season, we’re going to be calling this community into deeper relationship – whether that be through joining a SEMIS Coalition event, reaching out to another Coalition member to set up a time to connect, or by contributing to our upcoming end of year giving campaign or strategic planning efforts. We know this season of transformation – whether personal or as a community – will be ongoing, and challenging, but we believe it will also be better together.
In Partnership,
Anna Balzer
Director, SEMIS Coalition | abalzer1@emich.edu
