Story Circles 2.0: Sustainability Through Curriculum Integration
Last year, I shared the transformative impact of story circles in Grade 9 Language & Literature at the International Community School of Addis Ababa. What began in 2024 as an innovative approach to deep listening and community engagement evolved, in 2025, into a sustainable practice with deeper roots and broader reach.
I recently sat down with Joshua Smalley and Adrienne Garcia, two teachers currently leading this unit, to discuss how the practice has evolved in its second year and what makes it sustainable and transformative for their school community.
Below: Adrienne (left) and Joshua (right) during this year’s grade 9 Language and Literature Story Exchange.
From Supporting Role to Core Practice
Adrienne was part of the original teaching team (with Rebecca Gillman and David Jordan) when story circles were first introduced in the spring of 2024 as part of the culminating unit of the year.
Students partnered up with adults from the ICS school community and from Mekedonia, a community partner organization that has a long-standing relationship with ICS. Using a sharing framework from Narrative 4, each partner introduced themselves and shared their personal stories. Participants then regrouped in pods of 6, and partners introduced their partners to the larger group using a first-person point of view (each person took on the persona of their partner and spoke from their perspective). This protocol is powerful and leads to a deep connectedness and honouring of identities and experiences.
"My first response was, how are we going to assess that?" Adrienne remembers, articulating a common question when educators first integrate service learning into the academic curriculum.
After witnessing the profound impact of the first story circle exchange, Adrienne's perspective shifted dramatically: "After the story circle event happened, I remember walking away and saying to my colleague, ‘that has got to be one of the top 10 best experiences of my entire career’."
This transformation from skepticism to advocacy is a key element in the sustainability of any innovative practice. When teachers experience firsthand the power of an impactful approach, they become its champions, ensuring its continuation even if staffing changes occur.
Evolving the Practice in Year Two
In its second iteration, the final unit of the year maintained its core structure of “exchanging stories for a better world” and also evolved in several important ways:
1. Framing with purpose and bigger questions
The team linked this year’s story exchange more explicitly to peace-building and peacekeeping, challenging students to consider whether sharing stories can truly accomplish these ambitious goals.
As Adrienne explains, "We took the Narrative 4 and UNESCO [approaches] and said to the students: ‘We do story exchanges for peace-building and peacekeeping’. We asked the students, ‘Do you think this claim works?’"
Students were encouraged to think critically and analyze this claim throughout the story exchange experience.
Joshua, who joined the MYP4 team this year, emphasizes that intercultural understanding was a big part of peace-building and peacekeeping themes.
“I have lived here in Addis for seven years, and my wife is Ethiopian,” he says. “I speak a little Amharic, and one of my children attends school here at ICS, and the local staff at our school know all of us. I was able to meet with the local staff this year to talk with them about participating in the story exchange, because last year we weren’t able to bring as many people into the experience as we might have liked, and we wanted everyone to see that we think their stories matter and our students need to hear them.”
This led to more local staff participating in the story exchange this year, which has had a valuable impact in building community and a shared sense of mission for ICS students, educators, and staff.
“We spent more time front-loading this experience with our partners this year, explaining it and sharing that we really do want to hear their stories,” reflects Adrienne.
2. More intentional preparation
Students received more opportunities to practice the story exchange protocol with their peers before the formal exchange with community members this year. First, they watched their teachers model a story exchange, and then they had the opportunity to practice multiple times before participating in the live event with community adults.
“When the students were practicing, we kept changing up the groups and asking students to consider questions like ‘could they be vulnerable?’ and ‘do they want to be vulnerable?’ and ‘is there something they could share that would give rise to more empathy?’. It took the grade 9 students three or four runs to get a handle on this,” explains Adrienne.
This approach to scaffolding helped students gain confidence and consider more deeply what stories they wanted to share.
3. Broader community engagement
The team made special efforts to include voices that were underrepresented in the first year, particularly those of the school's cleaning staff. As well, adults from additional community partner organizations and local schools were invited to participate.
As a consequence, more adults volunteered to participate than were needed, which indicates the value that adults and community partners can see in the process and outcomes of the story exchange.
“I think we’re all feeling the beauty of seeing and hearing each other's stories,” says Adrienne. “There’s something so healing about this process, and it connects us in a more authentic way than any of us are used to.”
Below: photos from partners sharing stories in round 1 of this year’s Story Exchange.
4. Institutional support
With one successful iteration behind them, the team secured more institutional resources and support, such as administrative encouragement to present the initiative to the entire staff. As a result, awareness of the event and its community impacts is growing.
“The people who participated last year and came back this year entered the space like old friends; there was a sense that we were all each other’s people,” says Adrienne. “And there was a mixture with new people participating, too, and a sense that this was a safe space. There’s a culture and tradition growing around this event that is giving it traction in the community.”
Authentic Assessment
One of the most challenging aspects of embedding service learning in the curriculum is assessment. How do you evaluate student learning without diminishing the authenticity of the service experience?
The team found a thoughtful solution by separating the story exchange itself (which remains unassessed) from a follow-up journalistic reflection that allows students to process and reflect on the experience. The written task asks students to establish the setting, tell their partner's story, tell their own story, and evaluate the experience in relation to the unit's statement of inquiry.
To help students understand the structure, the grade 9 team created a colour-coded mentor text including the four key components (establishing the setting, telling their story, telling their partner’s story, and analyzing the statement of inquiry). This approach enabled assessment of language, organization, descriptive writing, and analytical thinking while preserving the integrity of the exchange itself.
Below: an excerpt from the instructions for exploring this year’s colour-coded writing exemplar.
Impact on Student Learning
The reflections revealed profound student learning and growth of self-awareness and understanding of diverse community narratives. The majority of students described significant shifts in perspective.
One student's reflection particularly moved the teachers. The student wrote about initially feeling a bit offended when she felt her partner seemed to be ignoring her but, as she connected more deeply to her partner’s story, those feelings shifted to empathy and awareness. When the student shared her partner’s story with her small group in the story exchange, she found herself becoming "an immediate defendant, emotionally and verbally," asking others to pay attention to her partner's story.
Joshua describes the student’s reflection as "post-collegiate level… Sometimes you need to grow from these experiences, understand defending people because they are people, and understand everyone has a story." All of this was evident in the student’s reflection about the story exchange.
Adrienne adds that this student began to empathize with her partner, an older woman from the Mekedonia community centre.
“She stepped into her shoes during this exchange and began to think about how this was the first time this woman had come into this space and how she was probably feeling really nervous. She began to think about why the woman’s body language might have been a reflection of how she was feeling, so now you have this 14-year-old who is beginning to understand someone who is very different from them. It’s quite amazing,” reflects Adrienne.
“Tisalem is not a story, she is not a cautionary tale or head shake, she is not a gasp, she is not an archetype made to help people feel grateful for their livelihoods. She is a woman, she is a human being. ”
Another student was unexpectedly paired with the school principal and discovered they had experienced similar challenges.
"I never knew this about our principal. I never knew he could have gone through the same thing I'm going through. Now I know what I can do in this situation," the student wrote in their summative reflection.
This unexpected connection illustrates how story exchanges can transform institutional relationships, breaking down hierarchies and fostering genuine human connection.
Expanding the Practice and Nurturing Sustainability
What began as an impactful learning experience in one academic unit is showing multiple signs of impact and expansion:
Growing community partner interest: Additional community partners have joined the initiative, including another school whose leadership wants to implement the practice in their own setting.
Student ambassadors are emerging organically: Former participants are naturally becoming ambassadors for the program. Adrienne shared that when speaking with her grade 10 students about the upcoming story circles, "one of my grade 10 students jumped up, and he said, 'I remember that, and I still say hi to my partner (a security guard at ICS).'" These ongoing relationships demonstrate the lasting impact of the exchange.
Interest from other grade levels: Teachers from other grade levels and divisions have reached out asking how to implement similar learning experiences with their students. Joshua's hope for next year is "vertical alignment with the 10th grade students and to see if there's a way to work this into their curriculum."
Documentation for continuity: The team is collecting extensive documentation such as student writing, reflections from students and adults, and photos to inform future iterations and potentially share with a broader audience (with appropriate permissions).
The AI Connection: Understanding Human Empathy
In an intriguing curricular twist, Joshua incorporated AI tools into the unit this year by asking students to analyze AI-generated responses to deep listening prompts.
"I thought I would like to introduce artificial intelligence tools to our students, ironically, in the middle of a unit rooted entirely in human empathy," he explains.
This exercise served multiple purposes: it helped students recognize authentic empathy by contrasting it with AI responses, provided models (even if imperfect) of listening and responding, and demonstrated the limitations of AI in replicating genuine human connection. Students quickly identified that AI responses "didn't feel right" and were able to articulate what authentic empathetic responses might include instead.
Lessons for Sustainable Service Learning
The evolution of story circles at ICS Addis offers valuable insights for educators seeking to create sustainable service learning practices:
1. Embed in curriculum
By integrating the story exchange into the MYP curriculum for Language and Literature, the team ensured it wasn't dependent on individual teacher passion but became part of the expected learning journey. As two core teachers from 2024/25 moved out of the team and new teachers came on board, the learning experience was preserved and enhanced because of its articulation as part of the MYP4 curriculum. This is a key aspect of sustainable approaches to service learning and community engagement.
2. Document impact
Collecting reflections, write-ups, and feedback provides evidence of the practice's value, making it easier to further celebrate, protect, and grow the learning experience during curriculum reviews.
3. Build institutional memory
Creating mentor texts, protocols, and documentation helps create bridges between cohorts and teaching teams, preventing any loss of knowledge as staff changes occur.
4. Foster community ownership
By involving diverse community members and emphasizing the value of everyone's stories, the practice becomes owned by the community rather than just a few educators or participants.
5. Connect to broader frameworks
Linking the practice to recognized approaches (like Narrative 4 and UNESCO) provides credibility and resources that support sustainability.
6. Create student leadership opportunities
As students become advocates and ambassadors, they help sustain the practice through peer-to-peer sharing of values and skills.
Below: Photos from round 2 of this year’s Story Exchange (where partners share each other’s storis).
Looking Forward
As Adrienne eloquently puts it: "I know that, for myself, I'll be doing [story circles] for the rest of my life. Whether I'm a teacher in a public school, or in a community center somewhere, or in another country, it doesn't matter. This, I know, will be something that I take with me forever."
This transfer of practice beyond a specific school context is perhaps the ultimate measure of sustainability. When educational approaches become so internalized that teachers and students carry them forward into new settings, they transcend the fragility of individual programs and become enduring contributions to educational practice.
The use of story circles at ICS Addis demonstrates how curriculum can be the vehicle for sustainable curricular service learning, not as an add-on or one-time event, but as an integral part of how students develop language skills, empathy, community connection, and intercultural understanding. As well, other academic aims, such as the IB’s multilingualism tenets, can also be impacted through this type of meaningful storytelling experience. Adrienne shares that this was the case this past year, with Student Support Services assisting EAs and other community members involved in the story exchange.
By thoughtfully embedding these practices in the curriculum, documenting their impact, and fostering community ownership, schools can create service learning experiences that endure and evolve year after year.
Check out my interview with Adrienne and Josh below to hear more details from these amazing educators about the impact of story exchanges.
