A New Narrative for Schools: the Blog

Storytelling, community engagement, global citizenship, sustainability… Welcome to my blog!

LeeAnne Lavender LeeAnne Lavender

Partnering for service learning excellence

LeeAnne’s partnership with the American Community School of Abu Dhabi includes on-site and virtual components of coaching, facilitation, and strategic planning.

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LeeAnne Lavender LeeAnne Lavender

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.

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LeeAnne Lavender LeeAnne Lavender

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!

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LeeAnne Lavender LeeAnne Lavender

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.

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LeeAnne Lavender LeeAnne Lavender

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.

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LeeAnne Lavender LeeAnne Lavender

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.

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LeeAnne Lavender LeeAnne Lavender

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.

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LeeAnne Lavender LeeAnne Lavender

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.

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LeeAnne Lavender LeeAnne Lavender

Storytelling IS your marketing

How Antwerp International School replaced all marketing strategies with storytelling for authentic engagement with prospective families.

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LeeAnne Lavender LeeAnne Lavender

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.

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LeeAnne Lavender LeeAnne Lavender

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!

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LeeAnne Lavender LeeAnne Lavender

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.

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LeeAnne Lavender LeeAnne Lavender

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.

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LeeAnne Lavender LeeAnne Lavender

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.

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LeeAnne Lavender LeeAnne Lavender

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.

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