Stories in Progress
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Stories in Progress 〰️
“To learn is to construct, to reconstruct, observe with a view to changing— none of which can be done without being open to risk, to the adventure of the spirit.
~Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom
This is a space for collaborators of Foreword Motion to riff on how we “construct, reconstruct, and observe with a view to changing” and to describe the adventures of our spirits.
The way we make things, the process of how we create and collaborate, matters much. It’s also fun and instructive to think about. Let’s go!
ONE YEAR OF
FOREWORD MOTION
January 12, 2024
Foreword Motion is celebrating one year of making stories make change. Learn about our current and recent projects.
Samples available upon request.
MULTIMEDIA TOOLKIT DESIGN
The organization: New York City Outward Bound Schools promotes equitable, immersive, and joyful learning in more than 70 NYC public schools. Their work is grounded in the understanding that social, emotional and academic development (SEAD) are innately interconnected to support young people to thrive.
The change: Educators aren’t often given space in classrooms to process their own stories and emotions. Yet, in order for educators to foster SEAD competencies in students, they need their own opportunities for story sharing and reflection that are built into the continuous improvement work they regularly engage in.
The story: Foreword Motion is creating Crew Stories, a multimedia toolkit to develop SEAD competencies in both educators and students through a story sharing approach. The toolkit is aligned to the organization’s theory of action work and contains documentary video case stories from NYC schools along with prompts and protocols to process the stories and apply them to continuously improving practice.
COURSE DESIGN + FACILITATION
The organization: Northeastern Illinois University is a public University in Chicago ranked number 1 among all Midwest colleges and universities as the most diverse. The Community and Professional Education department offers non-credit classes, workshops and summer programs to the community.
The change: Students in the Stories in Progress class brought a “change process” to the group, and engaged in communal story sharing protocols to adapt and apply to their unique situations. Designed in a lab format, students shared their progress toward change with classmates as the work evolved. Change processes revolved around topics of othering & belonging in schools, affordable housing justice, perimenopause treatment, and tensions in Jewish school funding.
The story: Foreword Motion designed and facilitated this 8 week course featuring protocols adapted from story sharing traditions around the world and throughout history.
PODCAST PRODUCTION
The organization: EL Education is a leading national nonprofit partnering with K-12 educators to transform diverse public schools into hubs of opportunity for all students to achieve excellent equitable outcomes. EL is guided by a reimagined definition of student achievement in “three dimensions” – mastery of knowledge and skills, character, and high quality work.
The change: School districts are not always designed with a “three dimensional” or whole child approach to teaching and learning, instead often focusing mostly on metrics like test scores. EL Education’s “Advancing Equity” project partners with school districts to enact a whole child approach toward equitable outcomes for all students.
The story: Foreword Motion produces the podcast series Districts Designed in Three Dimensions featuring school district partnerships in Sunnyside, AZ; Oakland, CA; and Madison, WI. Episode 1 focuses on why three dimensional learning must be designed systematically at the district level. Episode 2 explores the change management process of doing so.
PRESENTATION DESIGN
The organization: UPLAN (United Parent Leaders Action Network) convenes parent leaders and groups nationally to share the best of leadership development and organizing. They engage parents who are often left out of decision-making tables and fight for policies such as equitable access to child care, parent engagement, and immigrant family protection. They represent 36 parent-led organizations and reach over 700,000 families each year.
The change: UPLAN has drafted a campaign self-evaluation tool that groups can use to guide and evaluate their campaigns. The tool will be shared with parents at various presentations to collect input and put it into practice in tandem with trainings and coaching.
The story: Foreword Motion is designed a bilingual deck to present the tool at convenings. Using visuals of parent power alongside the core content of the tool itself, the deck will inform and inspire parents toward greater organizing impact.
STRATEGIC CONSULTING
The organization: 2Revolutions works with educators and communities to realize a learner-centered future. They focus on transforming classroom experiences while building the systemic support needed to sustain these changes. They empower educators with learner-centered practices, and partner with communities to uncover local solutions through aligned policies, structures, and practices that sustain and scale learner-centered approaches system-wide.
The change: 2Rev is embracing storytelling as a vehicle for change by creating a new staff role: Director of Storytelling. The Director is seeking strategic guidance on how to weave 2Rev’s evolved concept of the “two revolutions” (in practice and in policy) into a range of multimedia products.
The story: Foreword Motion provides strategic consulting to the Director of Storytelling to set and work toward storytelling goals and approaches for inspiration and impact.
VIDEO PRODUCTION
The organization: sideby is dedicated to connecting education professionals to accelerate innovation in teaching and learning, together. Their app provides paired conversations with targeted prompts along selected and responsive “learning pathways.”
The change: sideby is a newly formed organization that has recently transitioned from a previous business. They need to tell compelling stories of use cases to bring new members into the community and to communicate their evolved brand.
The story: Foreword Motion produces video stories featuring sideby users who represent different use cases. The process involved strategic conversations with sideby leadership, screening and selecting footage from the app dashboard, and working with educator app users to co-create authentic stories of the app’s impact.
MUSIC PRODUCTION
The organization: EL Education is a leading national nonprofit partnering with educators to transform diverse public schools into hubs of opportunity for all students to achieve excellent equitable outcomes. Their highly rated ELA curriculum is based on the Science of Reading, including structured phonics, which empowers all students to read complex texts and master literacy standards.
The change: A structured and systematic approach to phonics is new for many educators and students. EL Education’s Skills Block is designed to continually build students' ability to map graphemes (letters) to phonemes (sounds). The infusion of music is one of the most critical ways to incorporate the characteristics of primary learners into foundational skill development.
The story: Foreword Motion, along with Multipotent (Rosa Gaia) and Mr*Sparkle (Sean Brennan) worked with EL to produce a suite of music and lyric videos, Skills Songs, which are integrated into daily Skills Block lessons to infuse animal-themed joy into learning to read and write.
COMMUNITY PROJECTS
The organization: Chicago Public Schools is the fourth largest school district in the United States, serving 323,251 students. My own kids attend CPS Mary Gage Peterson Elementary, which is celebrating it’s 100th anniversary this year. I am co-teaching an after school club to involve students in the centennial celebration. The club is sponsored by the North River Commission which is committed to enhancing the wellbeing of its diverse Chicago community through collaboration, engagement, and coalition building. My own 2 kids are in the club! : ) : )
The change: As Peterson celebrates its centennial, students are considering the changes the school has been through over 100 years, and the changes it may go through during the next 100. What can we find out and share about Peterson’s past and present? How and why has it changed? How can we build toward its future?
The story: This club is co-facilitated by a multimedia storyteller (me), a Peterson alum, and a professional archivist. Together we explore: What can archives tell us about the past? How can oral history tell another story? How can we combine multiple sources— documents, artifacts and interviews— to tell a fuller story? The class will preserve selected artifacts from 12 boxes of Peterson archives and display them on a website, public library collection, and at a centennial event. They will also interview alumni and current students to create a documentary video using archival sources and captured multimedia, to be shown at the centennial event.
TOOLKIT TIME!
August 26, 2024
In March I wrote about our inspiration for the NYC Outward Bound Schools toolkit to foster Social, Emotional, and Academic Development (SEAD) for educators and students, and now a pilot version of the toolkit is getting tested in NYC Public Schools!
I’m grateful to collaborators Dr. Crystal Belle, Aurora Kushner, Rosa Gaia, Julie Benns, Jonny Altrogge, and Hannah Read. Thank you for your creative and practical ideas, and for your trust in the power of story sharing to transform practice. I’m eager to learn from the pilot and to use the feedback to inform the ongoing work as we build out the other sections to correspond with the remaining “change packages” that anchor the continuous improvement work in this amazing network.
In addition to learning from the work on the ground in NYC, I’ll also be facilitating several of these story sharing protocols through a course called “Stories in Progress” through the CAPE program at Northeastern Illinois University in person in Chicago. You can register for the course and join us.
Check out the pilot version of the “Crew Stories” toolkit!
I FEEL LIKE SUCH A TOOL!
March 17, 2024
Toolkits have been inspiring me lately, especially ones I’m encountering in the organizing/movement space, like In It Together from Interrupting Criminalization and Dragonfly Partners, the Let This Radicalize You workbook by Project Nia based on the book by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba, and the Narrative Design Toolkit from Butterfly Lab. Their design invites me to reflect and create, without feeling judged on some rubric of how to be a better organizer. Teachers are organizers too, and I want to give them tools like this. When teachers are engaged in healing-centered practices like restorative justice and trauma-informed care, they need a supportive space and structure to process their own experiences and to freedom dream.
We’ve been working with NYC Outward Bound Schools on their “Crew Initiative” — an NYC Department of Education-funded project to increase social emotional and academic development (SEAD). Over fifty NYC public schools are part of an improvement network, sharing practice across schools, and engaging in continuous improvement cycles. Educators develop and implement “change ideas” to grow their practice of integrating social-emotional learning and academics. We’re working on the documentation and dissemination part of the work, creating videos that show the crew initiative work in action.
Rosa was documenting some work at Harvest Collegiate High School and interviewed a student named Ness, who was teaching her peers about Ramadan in response to islamophobia she experienced at school. Rosa asked to return to the school to document Ness teaching a leadership class that included students of different faiths, Ness agreed, and this video was born.
This video, and others made in collaboration with NYC students and educators, will become case studies in a creative toolkit. In this toolkit, educators and students can choose from a menu of creative protocols, mostly rooted in storytelling practices, to process the video case studies, and apply them to their own practice. We want the toolkit to feel creative, generative, supportive, inspiring, and also practical. To practice liberatory design, we want to make this toolkit with those closest to the problem, and those who will be using it. Our plan is to pilot a section of it, focused on student voice and leadership, and user test it with participants. Just like the “change ideas” that educators are working to “adapt, adopt, or abandon,” we enter into this toolkit design process with the adventurous spirit to “construct and reconstruct” based on feedback from those closest to the work. Because what’s the point of a toolkit designed without help from the people who need to use the tools?