Telling the Story

Stories began unfolding in her school, more and more stories. Stories of new learning discoveries, new learning opportunities, new excitement.

When Jami and I embarked on this journey I shared with her that it felt that we lived in two worlds. As a technologist in this new creative economy, mine was defined by a Paradigm of Abundance. Hers, as an educator living in a world defined by the industrial economy, was defined by a paradigm of scarcity.

In my world, we were always running as fast as we can to take advantage of new opportunities. School districts, on the other hand, were always dealing with the next budget crisis, and struggling to make do with less.

When we began this journey I wondered: if Jami began to live in my culture, might her world transform from scarcity to abundance?

It happened. Not only was there abundance flowing from within her building, but from the outside too. For instance, one day a set of boxes arrived from Tektronix. Jami called me up and asked me if I knew anything about them. I didn't.

But, after digging around, I found out that one of their senior executives had heard Jami and me speak at an event and wanted to donate an entire set of testing equipment to the school. Then there was a massive crane donated by Nike. 3D printers showed up one day from another company. And the list went on.

There were many other stories. But they weren’t being told.

We set up the Innovate Dayton website to post articles, but we were struggling to find resources to write them. Jami felt that it was important to empower the students as the storytellers. But how?

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