History
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Detroit Future Schools is a program of Allied Media Projects (AMP). As DFS refines best practices and produces packaged curriculum, AMP will use its established pathways of the Allied Media Conference to distribute lessons from DFS nationally. To begin to fully understand DFS, a history of AMP needs to be provided.
Allied Media Projects (AMP) advances media strategies for a more just, creative and collaborative world. For more than fifteen years, AMP has hosted the annual Allied Media Conference, where media activists and educators converge from around North America to share skills in media production, democratic education, and community organizing for social justice.
Since relocating to Detroit, MI from Bowling Green, OH in 2006, AMP has offered year-round support to Detroit educators and activists wanting to integrate digital media skills into their work for community transformation. We belong to a sprawling network of Detroit community leaders who are taking up the task to “create the world anew,” as philosopher/activist Grace Lee Boggs has articulated it--building new forms of education and economic development in the shell of Detroit’s post-industrial systems.
The community AMP serves is both local and national. Approximately 35% of the 2,000 Allied Media Conference participants come from the City of Detroit. The other 65% come from more than 200 different towns and cities. A majority of participants in AMP programs are people of color from low-income communities. A majority are women and approximately 25% are under 21. A significant percentage identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered or queer. Every year AMP makes its programs more accessible to parents, people with disabilities, non-English speakers, and people of all ages and genders. Accessibility is one of our core practices because we believe our movements suffer without the contributions of people most marginalized by the current power structures.
AMP’s dual identity as a local and national organization is one of its greatest strengths, as people from other cities increasingly want to learn from the models of community problem-solving emerging at Detroit's grassroots.
BTOP, DFM & DFS
In 2009, coming out of the Allied Media Conference, AMP launched the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition as a collaborative effort to secure a federal broadband adoption grant aimed at closing the digital divide in Detroit. The grant was secured in 2010 awarding Detroit $1.8 million. AMP expanded its programs to include local trainings for Detroiters. These trainings carried the spirit and skills of the annual Allied Media Conference into the work for community revitalization that was prevalent in Detroit. These programs became Detroit Future Media and Detroit Future Schools. Through DFM, AMP developed a pool of digital media artists who not only had the skills to produce high quality media, but to bring media-based organizing methods into classrooms, small businesses and community organizations throughout the city.
Several of the artists emerging from DFM then became the artists for Detroit Future Schools. In the summer of 2011, a call for teachers was put out and from the 28 applications received, 12 teachers were selected and paired with the 8 DFM artists.
While Detroit has a number of long-standing arts-integration programs, such as Living Arts, Inside Out Literary Arts and Y-Arts, no other educational organization in Detroit merges digital media arts with critical pedagogy, community-school interaction and documentation and evaluation at all levels of our programming. DFS is also unique for the support it provides not only to students but also to teachers learning new and challenging pedagogy.
In many of the 12 classrooms of our inaugural year, we saw increases in student attendance, test scores and overall engagement. Even more profound than these baseline metrics were the transformation we saw in students’ sense of ownership of their education and by extension, their lives and the fate of their communities. In one DFS classroom students successfully organized a “freedom school” in the park across the street from their school to protest injustices within the school and project a vision for what real education could look like. In a student interview, the 11th grader stated that his classroom was different than others in his school because “it makes me feel more human.”