Introduction
2
The education system in Detroit, MI has become a national icon of failure. Media coverage highlights the low test scores, high drop-out rates and entrenched political dysfunction. Within this state of crisis, educators in Detroit face the challenge and the opportunity of reinventing the purpose and practice of education. Rather than prepare future low-wage workers, or future professionals who will leave Detroit in order to be successful, Detroit schools must prepare future leaders who will commit themselves to transforming their own lives and communities through creative work, social entrepreneurship and community organizing.
How do we teach in our schools for a more just, creative and collaborative world?
The concept of “transformative education” has become a catchall phrase that can mean anything and nothing at all. Detroit Future Schools over the past two years has brought digital media arts into Detroit Public School classrooms in order to engage students in meaningful investigations of their communities. We have come to understand transformative education as the thing that happens when teachers, students, artists and community members are all invested in a process of becoming more fully human. In the simplest terms, Detroit Future Schools is an in-school program which believes that the power of relationships--relationships to ourselves, to one another and to our world--will foster this world.
Additionally, the prevailing model of test-driven education not only lacks the practices necessary for transformative education, it lacks the ability to see and measure it when it’s happening.
Detroit Future Schools is building a distributed network of teachers, youth, community organizers and digital media artists who are testing and refining the instructional practices we need to fulfill this new purpose of education in Detroit. Through purposeful documentation and evaluation of our core practices, we are honing a model that can be replicated and evolved in other cities. We are committed to an “open source” approach to transformative pedagogy that will allow the maximum number of people to benefit from our learnings as possible.
"I hold myself to a higher standard as a DFS teacher."
The Detroit Future Schools Guide to Reinventing Education will compile the theory and practice of AMP’s Detroit Future Schools program in order to make its methods for transformative education “open source” to teachers and schools across the globe.
The intended audience of this guide are youth and adults who work in or attend school. The hyperlinks to documents are accessible only to those within the DFS network.
This guide is an attempt to unpack our process for transforming our schools and our city making both more just, creative and collaborative.
DFS teachers and artists meet over the summer to plan out their DFS curricula for the year. --Photo: N8 Mullen