In the spring of 2004, KnowledgeWorks Foundation brought together a group of respected writers from around Ohio to witness and write about urban school reform. The team spent hundreds of hours inside of small school and early college programs, watching students, teachers and administrators undergo the growing pains of school transformation.
The idea behind storytelling wasn’t an easy sell: to tell the authentic stories of the challenges these schools faced, and not to sugarcoat the inevitable difficulties of urban schools with financial crises and other long-entrenched problems. The storytellers sat in on classes, staff meetings, professional development sessions, school assemblies and field trips, trying to capture a sense of not only the complexities of the challenges, but the personal stories of a few of the people involved. The group met several times a year to share and workshop the writing, compare notes and debate the best ways to present these narratives.
The result was a series of national award-winning publications:
Every School Deserves a Legacy 2008
Every School Deserves a Legacy 2007
Every School Deserves a Legacy 2005-2006
Written by one of the project’s master storytellers, Metro School Stories (known to those behind it as Storytelling 2.0) is the first foray into digital narrative.
