Over the past few years, I’ve helped design and launch several advocacy and awareness campaigns. These campaigns were focused on building a community of supporters by using media, messaging, storytelling, and the power of the Internet to help people share their voices, raise awareness on core issues and bring about meaningful change.
To see for yourself, learn more about the campaigns by checking out the links below. Or contact me directly if you want me to advise you on your own campaign.
Next State of Learning — A national campaign of the Innovation Lab Network, Next State of Learning tells the stories of four states that have undergone major changes to their public school systems, and tries to seed similar efforts elsewhere in the country. The project was anchored by four short films, explanatory infographics, and a range of supplementary videos for each state.
A Year at Mission Hill — A 10-part video series about a remarkable public school in Boston, and a collective effort to seed a sustained conversation about what great teaching and learning really looks like — and requires. Every other Thursday between January and June 2013, a new 5-minute video will be released. These chapters are intended to serve not just as episodes in a larger story about a single school, but also as “communications comets” to which we can sustain a conversation about reinventing American public education.
Faces of Learning — A national initiative that aims to help everyone — young and old, educator and non-educator, Democrat and Republican — see more clearly what powerful learning actually looks like (and requires). Faces of Learning is a decentralized, collaborative, story-driven, nonpartisan, solution-oriented network of individuals and organizations. Its mission is to help build the capacity needed to support the creation and maintenance of high-quality learning environments. The campaign is doing this by creating virtual and physical spaces for people to reflect on four essential questions that are, alarmingly, almost completely absent from the current national conversation about school improvement:
1. How do people learn?
2. How do I learn?
3. What does the ideal learning environment look like?
4. How can we create more of them?
Will We Really — A national web-based campaign that challenged all Americans to transform the optimism of the 2008 election season into the promise of collective action to improve public education.
Grounding the campaign with a powerful short film (see below) featuring the voices of educators and young people, the Will We Really campaign asked all signatories to join together in urging the Obama administration to honor four promises that must be fulfilled if the United States is serious about supporting young people and public schools.
Rethink Learning Now — A national grassroots campaign that was designed to focus the country’s attention on three core pillars of successful education reform – powerful learning environments, highly-effective teaching in every classroom, and a system committed to ensuring fairness for all children.
Aside from releasing three provocative, conversation-starting PSAs (see below), the campaign invited people to recount their most powerful learning experiences and identify the attributes that made those experiences so successful. From these stories, an aggregate tag cloud was generated, demonstrating what core environmental attributes people need in order for powerful learning to occur – and then asking people to advocate for policies and practices that would support the wider creation of such environments.
The Learning PSA
The Teaching PSA
The Fairness PSA
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