"Get Inside" Empathy to Impact
Empathy to Impact helps teachers and learners co-design meaningful interdisciplinary units and projects through physically engaging with systems thinking in order to enhance pre-existing approaches to design, service as action, inquiry, and project-based learning experiences. Working together through an Empathy to Impact snapshot, educators can promote meaningful student-centered learning for critically, creatively, and empathetically addressing:
What do I care about and why?
How can I become more deeply aware and credibly informed?
How can I apply disciplinary skills and thinking, technology, and language?
How can I take informed action and have a positive impact on an internal, local, or global community?
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Expect the Unexpected: Community Street Photography
Photo!Bomb Street Photography: Look for and embrace the unexpected, candid moments of diverse lives. Develop an ability to find a sense of meaning within the mosaic of stories, faces, buildings, and movement in the streets. Ignite your creativity, for everybody has a story.
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Community Makerspaces: Sustainable Design Thinking for Social, Environmental, and Community Impact
As part of an interdisciplinary unit examining concepts related to sustainable design as future-focused solutions, students engaged in an Empathy to Impact project in which they explored and acted for community well-being through lenses of energy, food, imagination and play on campus.
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Social Justice Devised Digital Theatre
The act of exploring critical social justice issues helps prepare students to better understand and take informed action in a diverse global society. Using theater to create a more just and harmonious world is a powerful learning experience for urgent conceptual ideas that can transfer across disciplines.
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Empathy to Impact: A Transformative System for Interdisciplinary Unit Design
In designing learning experiences that embrace a world that is dynamic and ever-changing, Empathy to Impact sparks interdisciplinary teaching and learning that amplifies a deeper awareness of the meaningful connections which exist among disciplines, oneself, communities, nature, and our place in a complex world and time.
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Printmaking: What Do you Want Others to See?
In Art for Impact learning experiences, students develop transformative skills connected to the Empathy to Impact system for transformative learning:
Greater empathy through connecting to a community issue
Critical thinking through interpretation and research around mentor artists
Application of interdisciplinary skills and expressive communication in preparing an art piece and community exhibition
Resilience in having to adjust exhibition settings due to the pandemic and also in creating multiple drafts of prints to be capture the spirit of the artistic process and power of the advocacy component
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We Are Constantly in a State of Becoming: New Ways of Seeing through Photography
Photography and art: We are constantly in a state of becoming. We are constantly changing how we see the world, how we make photos, and whatever we find interesting. We are constantly changing our tools, our processing methods, and our own visual acuity is in flux — some things become brighter in our eyes, some things more dim. We are becoming both more near-sighted and far-sighted at the same time. - Eric Kim
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Kindergarten Happiness Index and the Magic Toymaker
Service and action in Kindergarten involves elements of imagination, play, active listening, relationship building, and also personalizing discovery based on interest. By leveraging transformative learning goals into authentic outputs and opportunities for deeper connections, students can be encouraged to use creativity in problem solving towards developing ideas like happiness in the community.
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Student-Led Futures Thinking for Whole School Strategic Planning
Futures thinking for education is a crucial component in identifying contextual, common transformative learning goals across a school or district following a challenging 2020-21 and a complex and ambiguous future. By focusing on change drivers such as globalization, sustainability, economics, work, social discourse, technology, and media, learners and educators are being presented with the urgent need to reimagine goals for learning that center on cognitive skills and dispositions for students to thrive in this complex landscape.
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MYP Design: Media Makers for Impact
Seoul Foreign School's Voice Lab is a way to actively engage with media maker skills and make the MYP ATLs and Design Criterion come alive. It is also a way to develop global competence and concepts related to compassion. By using media to inspire audiences and have them engage with local communities and local community issues, this design class aims to inspire and encourage positive change.
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Interdisciplinary Unit Planning... WITH Students
Collaborative planning with students, especially those in upper elementary or above brings many advantages to both teaching and learning. Students often bring a lot of prior knowledge to units and if unit planning is too teacher-centric and rigid, students can be demotivated or demoralized quickly by lack of engagement and relevance. In this case, Empathy to Impact also offers a number of pathways where teachers and students can together determine points of relevance, deep research, applied skills, and collaborative or more individualized community actions, which immediately promotes critical and creative thinking though a lens of great agency.
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Transformational Learning Demonstrated in "Inspired Global Citizenship"
Committing to exploring and reflecting on qualitative data learned from student evidence around the demonstration of these critical transformational goals, schools and educators can build innovative learning experiences and assessments that are future-focused and student-centered in response to our volatile, uncertain, and complex present and future.
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Listening Beyond: How People You Don't Know Can Transform You
Inspired by Storycorps, and as part of a partnership with the acclaimed Baltimore podcast Out of the Blocks, Inspire Citizens’ learners explore and converse with senior women in the local community to capture publishable stories via their subject’s world views on culture, personal histories, happiness, family, and words of wisdom for younger generations. This transformative learning experience now exists in numerous interdisciplinary units at Inspire Citizens’ partner schools, as part of the Future Now Leadership Toolkit, as well as being a feature mentor example for an Inspire Citizens podcast: Out of the Blocks: Global Youth Media
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Photo!Bomb: Thinking Like a Photojournalist
Centered on taking action for avoiding stereotypes and single stories of diverse communities, students practice Thinking Like a Photojournalist as part of the Global Youth Media Photo!Bomb photography and storytelling learning experience and community publication.
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2030: Portrait of a Graduate, Portrait of an Educator
As part of the recent #ISTEGlobalPLN SDGs in Education Playground, Inspire Citizens' Steve Sostak and student leaders from Western Academy Beijing led an interactive Socratic Seminar on the future of students, educators, and schools. Video here.
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