Partnerships with AISA educators: Inspire Citizens & new connections
This year the Inspire Citizens team has been excited to begin new partnerships and relationships with educators in the AISA (Association of International Schools in Africa) region.
Aaron Moniz traveled to Johannesburg in October to take part in AISA’s educators’ conference. This year was the first time educators have been able to meet face-to-face since the beginning of the Covid pandemic.
“It was so nice to see old friends and meet new ones at this year’s educators’ conference,” says AISA executive director Peter Bateman. “People spent a lot of time catching up and connecting this year, and it was wonderful to see relationships strengthened and created in our time in Johannesburg.”
Aaron led a pre-conference workshop called “designing whole school approaches to service learning” along with two deep dive sessions. The deep dives were titled “Empathy to Impact: education for engaged global citizenship, sustainability and service” and “inspired student leadership”. These longer, more in-depth sessions were followed up with two one-hour online workshops, one about “eco-media and digital advocacy” and another about “Empathy to Impact 101”.
“It was fantastic to meet so many AISA educators during the conference,” says Inspire Citizens co-founder Aaron. “Some teachers were able to attend all of my sessions and we were able to do some deep work in planning for effective and purposeful service learning. Some schools were able to develop almost a full implementation plan for service learning after our first pre-conference workshop.”
Aaron was excited to introduce the Inspire Citizens’ Empathy to Impact model to participants in his workshops.
“Educators walked out of the Empathy to Impact session with unit plans and unit enhancement ideas to positively impact their communities,” says Aaron. “Also, during the Inspire Student Leadership workshop, the educators and administrators engaged as if they were students, experiencing one of our workshops for student leaders. When we ended up pitching 'student leadership projects' at the end of the session, there was a moment where we could feel the impact, and a pride-filled and teary-eyed closing really summarized the power of these student leadership skills and protocols."
While in Johannesburg, Aaron was able to engage in facilitation with the American International School of Johannesburg (AISJ) in partnership with AISJ’s Service Learning Coordinator Tiwana Merritt.
“Our goal is to give teachers the tools to use Empathy to Impact to design units, learning experiences, projects and events - everything that a school would want to create an ecosystem for global citizenship,” says Aaron. “This is what we stand for with schools; it’s what is at the heart of what we do, and it’s what gives us the through-line of these divergent initiatives to bring things together.”
Inspire Citizens is looking forward to partnering with more schools in the AISA region and sends a big thank you to the AISA organizing team for putting together such an inspiring conference.
Below: photos from Aaron’s sessions at the fall AISA Educators’ Conference in Johannesburg.
