VIGNETTES

Students used their Mandarin language skills and applied them by making differentiated learning resources for a younger Mandarin audience at the school. They personalized the resources to the interests and language skills of the students, culminating their project in a group reading and sharing of their resources. The younger students added these resources to their personal and class libraries afterwards.

In the process, the younger students were surveyed about their Chinese language proficiency, about their personal interests and about their background knowledge of environmental issues, and with this information HS Mandarin students followed Empathy to Impact as a pathway to the MYP Service as Action planning cycle to create personalized learning resources for their identified learner.

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For the past two years, grade five teachers and learners at Western Academy of Beijing have partnered with Inspire Citizens on combining the deep learning inherent in the PYP exhibition with transdisciplinary themes of personalized artistic expression and systemic issues related to sustainable development, well-being, and equity.

Students continued to apply approaches to learning and monitor transformative skills and dispositions through lenses of thinking and designing like a researcher, artist, curator, educator, and advocate in creating immersive artistic spaces for audiences to engage and explore complex issues.

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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