A New Narrative for Schools: the Blog
Storytelling, community engagement, global citizenship, sustainability… Welcome to my blog!
Story Circles for impactful community engagement
Grade 9 students at the International School of Addis Ababa just experienced an English unit centred around story circles and story exchanges. The result of this deep listening is a transformed sense of self and others.
4 Pillars of Mindful Service
A grade 9 student at the International School of Kigali in Rwanda has created a new framework for service learning and community engagement called the “4 Pillars of Mindful Service”. Check out this inspiring story!
Earth Day poems ground community partnership
Elementary teachers and students at the American International School of Lagos in Nigeria used poems for Earth Day to deepen a budding community partnership with a local school.
11 tips on to plan an inter-disciplinary service experience
A grade 7 interdisciplinary learning experience at the American Community School of Abu Dhabi provides an excellent model of how to support students in an experiential deep dive into sustainability, community engagement and action.
How to plan a service celebration
Before you get too close to the end of the semester and school year, think about how you can celebrate the successes of your service learning and global citizenship programs. Hosting a community-wide celebration can raise the profile of what you’re doing and create a lot of momentum for meaningful action.
Approaches & ideas for cooking & gardening at your school
Check out one school’s multi-layered co-curricular approach to teaching students about sustainable food, from gardening and composting to cooking and social entrepreneurship.
Investigating service learning best practices: foundations for a whole-school program
The International School of Kenya is building a curricular PreK-12 service learning program and modelling what it’s like to create a strategy that is tailored to its context and rich history of service.
AI tools for digital storytelling
Are you curious about how to use generative AI tools for digital storytelling with your students? In this post I share my recent journey using DALL-E to create visual images, and how to craft prompts that generate specific images with students.
Healing Through Storytelling: a Journey of Resilience
Khartoum American School has been displaced since April of 2023 because of war in Sudan, and I had the opportunity to work with students and staff in November to use storytelling as a means of reflecting, healing and sharing messages of hope and resilience.
Storytelling IS your marketing
How Antwerp International School replaced all marketing strategies with storytelling for authentic engagement with prospective families.
Celebrating student leadership & agency
How to coach and support your student leaders to grow their skills and ensure they’re thinking about leading with sustainability and inclusion in mind.
Digital storytelling ideas to kick off the new school year
Do you need inspiration for ways to use digital storytelling in the first few weeks of the new school year? Look no further! Here are 5 ideas for elementary teachers and 5 for middle/high school teachers. Let’s tell some digital stories!
Podcasting advice from expert Tricia Friedman
Join the conversation I recently had with podcasting expert Tricia Friedman for inspiration about how to engage your students with podcasting this year!
Digital storytelling and inter-school partnerships in IB DP Economics
Picture 24 17-year-old high schoolers living completely different lives and with very different socio-economic backgrounds collaborating on a project 13 time zones apart. Today, such learning is made possible with technology and new pedagogies such as digital storytelling, and this is the story of one such collaboration.
PreK students use digital storytelling to demonstrate learning
When Dulwich College Suzhou (DCSZ) nursery teacher Ben Widdowson learned about a fun digital storytelling tool called Chatterpix, he knew it was something he wanted to use with his young learners.
Celebrating youth agency & advocacy through storytelling
When Dagne Furth, an experienced English literature and global citizenship educator, helped her students publish a book called Dear Tariq this past year, she knew she wanted to make the project available to teachers around the world.
What students have to say about digital storytelling
A fifth grade student talks about the excitement of publishing stories on his classroom digital storytelling platform, and 3 high school students share reflections on the power of digital storytelling in relation to an AISA-GISS conference.
Empathy - a foundation for critical service learning
Equipping students to connect with others and develop the ability to listen and empathize with others is foundational in our service learning programs and experiences. This is the backbone of good, critical service learning that shapes our students’ understanding of the world and opens up complex layers of thinking about self, community, equity and belonging.
A whole school approach to service learning
At Aga Khan Academy Mombasa, Kauthar Mohamed and her team have built a robust model for service learning that equips students to understand and apply all five stages of the service learning cycle.
Becoming carbon neutral: one school’s story
Responding to the climate crisis with purpose and a sense of hope and action is key for educators who want to equip students to think critically and creatively about the future. At the International School of Kenya (ISK), this approach has led to the creation of a collaborative and action-oriented network called the Carbon Neutral Alliance, and the students in this network have spearheaded a mission to make their school carbon neutral this year.