Dillon Community Literacy Story Stroll: Capstone Project 2022

Leadership Pathway: Community, Awareness, Engagement, and Advocacy

What is it? The Impact:

The Story Stroll project came out of a need for bringing the school and community together–providing an opportunity for what we do in the classroom to become a part of the daily life of our community. The Story Stroll project invites community members to get outside, to exercise/walk, enjoy nature, and to also enjoy a story along the way that was written and illustrated (and recorded) by our local students. The need was also inspired by the reality that what we do in school can be for the greater good outside of school. That writing and reading can also have other benefits when put in the format of a Story Stroll. I hope that it continues to inspire creativity and thinking of others/kindness. Our community needs a school/community collaborative project to bring the two together that promotes positive interactions and benefits many, along with our students and teachers need an opportunity to show how school and the real-world can meet in a project like a Story Stroll that creates positive interactions in the form of literacy, exercise, and family-time.

Needs Assessments

The Story Stroll project has multiple faucets to make it come to life, including fundraising/grant writing to support the project. First, Communication between all parties in the collaboration group to make sure everyone is feeling prepared and fairly involved in the process from start to finish. Second, time commitments from all parties in the collaboration group to successfully implement the project by April deadline. Third, Time collaboration for putting all aspects of project together from September through April. Lastly, Effective scheduling to meet all aspects of the project: recording, artwork, writing, editing, collaboration, presentation of final product.

My main form of needs assessment used were 1 on 1 interviews with several different parties. Included were Dillon Public Library, UMWestern, School Principal, 1st grade teachers (4 of them), Middle School Art teacher. Recruitment began with an interview with Lori Roberts, director of the Dillon Public Library as the main source of collaboration for my Story Stroll project idea. Lori suggested Katrina Kennett as our UMWestern liaison because of her education classes with a focus on technology. By means of diversity many interested parties have been involved in the creation and implementation of this project in the form of diverse groups helping make the Story Stroll project a reality.

The Interviews were in one-on-one or small group format were my main use of needs assessment and recruitment for the initial stages of implementing the Story Stroll project. The first interview was conducted in July 2020 at the Dillon Public Library for the initial collaboration and brainstorming of the Story Stroll project. A second interview including Katrina Kennett from UMWestern followed in August, and interviews with other interested parties happened during the first PIR days of school with 1st grade teachers, art teacher, and DMS principal to turn the project into a working reality. In the interviews I learned that many of the involved parties were excited about the promotion of literacy, speaking and listening skills, community building, and the multi-layered growth that students could learn with this year-long project. The big concerns were…1) creating a project that showcased multiple areas of learning/growth for our students in the form of reading, speaking, collaboration/teamwork, mentorship, using technology 2)time frame to make sure there was no scheduling conflicts that ensured the project could occur without creating stress on any contributing groups helping in the Story Stroll project.

Barriers and Obstacles

A project like this does have funding barriers. The Story Stroll project requires extra costs to produce this product for the community that is outside my normal classroom budget/school budget. We needed extra support to create large "real-estate" signs of the story so as to become a visible story to put into the ground. We wanted physical copies of the story to give to all students and participants involved.

The solution for this was several collaborative grant writing tasks for local support from organizations like the Art Council or United Way to help the funding of producing the Story Stroll. We were ultimately supported by United Way and the Friends of the Library Council. (See Figure A,B, D and Artifact 5 for models of grant writing process)

Who is Involved?

The Allies who helped make this project possible were UMWestern college support from local professor and education technology classes. This will support future teachers on chances to come into the classroom and see first-hand experience of incorporating technology into the classroom with elementary and middle school age students. Dillon Public Library: support will create a project that is long-standing for the community, promotes literacy, family time, and exercise. Principal & Teachers: support will showcase student’s collaboration between grade levels in the form of literacy, art, technology, and broadcast a project that was created with the intent of bringing the community together

The story stroll project called for a collaboration of diverse groups of people, including college students, 8th grade students, and 1st graders to complete the audio/technology features of the project. This allowed for a diverse range of age groups and allowed the different groups to take on roles of leader/model and learner. This project also brought together diverse groups: library, college, trail coalition, and students and staff. My goal of addressing diversity was to involve many community groups in the project to best reflect a project for the community. I am still hoping to also add a Spanish-speaking component to the project before publication/debut of the project if there is enough time.

Research & Resources

The project first took off with personal observation of opportunities that were lacking in our community merging schools with community. This lead to Interviews with community members invested in literacy and community projects. I will include in the creation of this project the Dillon Public Library, UMWestern college, and local art teacher, 1st grade staff and students, and 8th grade students from language arts classes. This variety of perspectives will bring knowledge and experience from different areas of working for the community together. Observation & Interviews were my two biggest research methods to shape this project. As this project is built from my own knowledge of the importance of literacy and encouraging families to come together for reading, I will be using personal observations and interviews as the means of my needs assessment. The parties involved are local and for creating the Story Stroll project, observation and interview work best for gathering data and moving forward on creating the project.

Growth

I believe the Story Stroll project will move me from Emerging to Performing stage where the Story Stroll was an idea to bring community and student learning together, and because of the planning and interconnections with other community stakeholders, this allowed me to connect families interests and their kids with a project that bridges school and community together. I believe this project will allow me to move to a Performing Stage, where this project will strengthen the school and community connection, strengthen teaching relationships with other teachers and community partners for future collaborations.

Overarching Competency #1: Personal Effectiveness. In taking on the year-long Story Stroll project 2021-2022 I planned to grow from the developing stage to the performing/transforming stage of growth. I hoped to see this growth by taking on the leadership role of creating this project and asking members of the Dillon Public Library and UMWestern to collaborate with me for the course of the year to make this project a success. I assumed this leadership role, balancing the role of teaching in my classroom, while also moving this project forward in an organized and timely manner to keep all collaborators involved in the project. Outside school meetings and responsibilities helped me balance this leadership project while continuing to teach. Using leadership to initiate a Story Stroll project for the community that would bring the community together with multiple parties involved to make the project possible. Also, to build communication and trust with working partners to make the project worthwhile: organized, scheduled plans to meet goals/timeline dates. I would say the Story Stroll project allowed me to grow into the performing stage. (See Artifact #2, #3, #8, #9 for feedback from collaborators on my communication and personal effectiveness in helping lead this project into its final product and the collaboration of emails and communication to keep the project moving forward)

Overarching Competency #2: Technological Facilities. In taking on the year-long Story Stroll project of 2021-2022 I planned to grow from emerging to developing/performing stage in this competency. This project required expanding my knowledge of technology to connect my Story Stroll project with the Dillon community in a way that acknowledges many ways of enjoying a story: audio, visual, kinesthetic, and if I am able, even multi-lingual. I planned to use technology to provide multiple ways to communicate with our community and share the power of a story written by their own children.

The Story Stroll project required a few new tasks involving technology to produce this type of project. This project allowed me to emerge into a developing and performing stage from the emerging stage. Several meetings during this project were to engage in professional 1 on 1 collaborations to learn how to use Synth recording and QR codes applications to produce the project for an audio aspect to the project. This increased my knowledge of new technology to use for the future as well. We plan on demonstrating our use of these technologies in upcoming conferences for the library to show how we put this project together for our community. (See Figure C and Artifact #6 for the Google Slide document that all students, teachers, and collaborators used to co-write, record, and publish our Story Stroll. You can see the QR codes on Artifact #6 that were implemented from our recording sessions onto each story page).

This project allowed me use research and collaboration skills to learn the new technologies to apply to this project and to teach college and middle schoolers how to use it to bring the project the audio element we wanted. This aspect was appealing to several groups participating as it builds on verbal/speaking skills for those participating and helped stakeholders respond well to the project idea.

This project called for a lot of organization, research, collaboration, and communication. I feel all of these elements helped build on effective leadership skills to run a project that involved multiple parties, successfully. Keeping all participating groups involved, well-communicated, and prepared helped to guide participants in the project.

Success: Debut of the Story Stroll on April 25th at Night of Excellence (See Artifact #9)

The project made its debut on April 25th in our Dillon Elementary district gym (both inside and outside). Two long tables were set-up with copies of the book itself in published form, along with "STEM" maker-table for creating your own character pillows, coloring sheets of the characters, and circuitry with those color sheets. The Story Stroll itself was located outside the doors near our tables for families and their children to enjoy. We had many participants at our tables and in the stroll itself.

Success: 1st grade and 8th grade Story Stroll Together

1st graders and 8th graders met on May 19th to do the Story Stroll together! 1st graders and 8th graders together were reading-aloud and taking an active part in the story! This interaction was a fun 45 minutes for each group to read together in the sunshine and get some exercise with walking (and working out Olympic style) among two age groups.

Artifact #9: Debut of the Story Stroll project at Night of Excellence for families and students.