Detroit Fellowship
The Leading for Liberation Fellowship is a two-year experience where teams of Detroit-based classroom teachers will work on moving beyond equity toward creating liberatory spaces in their classrooms, schools, and communities.
About the Fellowship
Detroit is a vibrant city whose strength lies in its rich history and cultural diversity. Educational opportunities for Detroit’s young people should build on those strengths and prepare them for the better world they imagine. But to move beyond the current reality, there is critical imaginative work required of educators and leaders.
That’s where the Leading for Liberation Fellowship comes in. Leading Educators is supporting the Detroit Children’s Fund and Teach 313 to launch a new two-year program for educators educators to diagnose the root causes of inequity in Detroit and design and lead for liberation.
Educators have power, both individually and collectively, as leaders in their classrooms and schools. This Fellowship centers the influence and power of each educator as an agent of change to recast classroom spaces as equitable learning environments where all students thrive and experience joy and belonging.
The Leading for Liberation Fellowship is a two-year experience for teams of Detroit educators. They will work towards making classrooms and schools liberatory spaces by leading critical conversations; advocating for what students need; restoring, repairing, and building inclusive communities; and facilitating learning that centers student ownership and criticality.
Leading Educators will design and facilitate professional learning content for fellows in collaboration with Teach 313 and the Detroit Children’s Fund. The fellowship is designed to be Detroit-specific focused on anti-racism, inclusivity, and liberation.
Teachers will examine all of the ecosystems within which they exist – Detroit, their neighborhoods, their school communities. To do this they will use the National Equity Project’s lenses of oppression. This in-depth examination, alongside their own personal introspective journey, will help them build their knowledge, empathy and skills to speak to these fundamental causes, while also helping their students and others understand and make meaning of them.
Teachers will have the comprehensive perspective and understanding they need in order to strategically and thoughtfully lead themselves, their students, and others towards liberatory experiences and spaces. Using abolitionist educator theories and concepts to frame their leadership (e.g. We Want to Do More Than Survive, Bettina Love), teachers will make connections and learn from community leaders and activists; analyze and identify oppressive structures; and collectively build “homeplaces,” where students and communities can thrive.
The fellowship will end with a culminating project using Robin E. Kelley’s Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination as a mentor text, which speaks to the oppressed person’s creativity as the colonizer’s last stronghold of control. Teachers use their learning to identify an equity issue and reimagine liberatory outcomes for their students and communities, alongside them.
Use the button below to access the live application at the Teach 313 website.
Related Content
While you’re here, check out these highlights about racial equity work at Leading Educators.
