Storytelling in Education

Nevada Succeeds

What is your vision of sharing your story and the stories of others?

Digital Document

How might we share our process of making change from the seat we are in?

Participants in the InspirED Global Fellowship documented their learning in action and I created this digital document to showcase their educator prototypes of solutions. Each participant filled out a 2 page case study, I formatted, added images, and attached interview videos with links to allow readers the opportunity to understand how they might make similar steps in their context.

Interview Videos

How might we personalize each follows participation, learning, and protypes in way that feels exciting, engaging, and relevant?

I sat down with each of the InspirED fellows to ask a series of questions to uncover their learning and unlearning. We discussed the steps they could make from the seat they were in and how design thinking would prompt them to find solutions for their context at all layers of the system. These videos were used on social media to spread awareness of the program, shift mindsets and perspectives in the community, and invite others to join our grassroots coalition for a brighter future for young people in the state of Nevada.

FOUND by Clark Dance

Youth Experience

How might dance students use design thinking in a global pandemic to create dance that connects with audiences and shares their common values of success, creating something out of nothing, and their hopes and dreams for the future?

Working with Jessica Sneek, a high school dance educator, I created a lesson plan template that asked dancers to conduct empathy interviews with each other asking the following questions:

  1. What is success?

  2. What is it like to make something from nothing?

  3. What are your hopes and dreams?

From the notes they captured in their empathy interviews; participants were asked to find an artifact that resonated and connected to the questions they asked and the answers they recorded. The artifact could be a song, poem, blog, short story, article, or other type of content. These artifacts would then be shared with their group and turned into a group found poem. Below are the found poems from the 3 groups of dancers.

Group #1-Found Poem.pdf
Group #2-Found Poem.pdf
Group #3-Found Poem .pdf

This found poem would be used as a springboard to create movement motifs that would later be abstracted to create longer phrases. The small groups would learn each others short phrases, build transtions and create a longer movement phrase that contained all of the groups work.

Each student would then submit a solo recording of their group choreography outdoors.

I asked student volunteers to submit an audio recording of their found poems and that became the soundtrack for their movement. I added music to their speaking and edited videos together to create a collective representation of student work for our Nevada Succeeds virtual conversation about design thinking and the future of learning in Nevada. You can see the video above.

Clark Dance Motif Checklist_.pdf