Creatively Connecting Curriculum to the Digital Learner
Message From the Executive Director
“Story has many different qualities that make it useful for the work of systems change. It’s a direct route to our emotions, and therefore important to decision-making. It creates meaning out of patterns. It coheres communities. It engenders empathy across difference. It enables the possible to feel probable in ways our rational minds can’t comprehend. When it comes to changing the values, mindsets, rules, and goals of a system, story is foundational.”
This wonderfully efficient quote points to the power of story to bring about impact or ‘systems change.’ The quote is not hyperbolic in the powers that it ascribes to storytelling. Take a look at The Diary of Anne Frank. That one story helped guarantee that millions upon millions would know about the Holocaust; begin to fathom its horror; and would never forget it. One story. Systems change.
The practice of Digital Storytelling is the promise of providing students with the agency to bring about ‘systems change.’ Planting this belief with your students – this hopeful sense of the possible, of visibility – is of incalculable value.
Digital Storytelling: Writing, amplified, for decades to come.
Brett Pierce [email protected]
Executive Director
[email protected]
(Quote from article by Ella Saltmarshe in the Stanford Social Innovation Review)
Meridian Stories News
Welcome to a host of new and returning schools for this year’s annual Competitions, including (among others) Freeport High School (Maine), Solanco High School (Pennsylvania) and Captain Nathan Hale Middle School (Connecticut).
Now is the time to Register if you are interested. All submissions are due in the end of March. Want a discount? Just ask.
Did you know that students have used their Meridian Stories’ Digital Story work as part of their college application process? Juniors: start now with a practice story. Seniors: look here for a cool Senior Capstone project that can be done remotely. Everyone else: go make a movie and add more meaning to the world!
Other …Digital Discoveries for the Classroom
The Daily Chatter – This is an extraordinary daily nugget of global information that is thoughtful, beautifully written, and committed to expanding your horizons. The regular newsfeeds don’t cover news from… Bucharest, Romania; Monrovia, Liberia; or Yerevan in Armenia. And yet, important political and social ideals and ideas are being shaped in these corners of the world. It’s not all Washington, Moscow and Beijing. The Daily Chatter delivers four stories, Monday through Friday. The stories will each cost you about two minutes of your day. More importantly, they open up the world in a way that humanizes the cultures and the people that live at the fringes of our global reach. Free to schools; around $20 annually for an individual. Check it out here.
Featured Video
Digital Storytelling is, first and foremost: fun!! Here is an entry from several years back that challenged students to use the format of the 70’s hit show, The Dating Game, to probe the properties of chemical elements. After you are done, unpack the experience for a moment. What will appear? Decision making, script writing, creativity, comedy, problem solving, character creation, acting, wit, directing, music editing, …and chemistry.
If you have any questions, please email me at [email protected].