A Story that Matters
Rise Up and Write: From Madison, USA to Lahore, Pakistan
We dance in a ring and suppose
The secret sits in the middle and knows.
— Robert Frost
I think I’ll call it Inception. When Bryn Orum and I scheduled our first meeting on 9/11, 2019, in the hope of exploring the possibility of starting a Youth Advocacy campaign in my IB school in Lahore, Pakistan, inspired by Bryn’s Rise Up and Write Summer Camp, in Madison, USA, we joked about coming together to write a different history through our collaboration. Not one of us ‘suppose[d]’ that we would successfully launch a virtual partnership that would open a real wormhole of opportunities for our students, separated by 1000s of miles, across two continents and two time zones. And now, that the wormhole has taken a new turn and thrust us all into a global pandemic where we’re all officially in lockdown, TNS Rise Up and Write has taken a life of its own and has pushed us into virtual realms, that both of us did not anticipate on that evening of 9/11. And so, excited as we are, we both decided to share, with our fellow community of teachers, the ‘secret’ to what we believe has helped us virtually rise up and write, in the middle of a global pandemic, a story that matters.
Why Rise up and write?
As teachers, I believe we are used to ‘danc[ing]’ within ‘ring[s]’ of pedagogical constraints, curriculum requirements, students’ interests, aptitudes and more. While we are inside the ring, a part of us is always outside it, looking at ways of breaking the moulds, infusing them with new life, creating possibilities for something new. I was looking for such a pedagogical model for advocacy to meet my IB MYP Language and Literature curriculum goals as well as equip my students with the skills needed to launch their own Community & Personal Projects that are mandatory to the IB MYP programme, when Mark Childs, in an IB training workshop, introduced me to Bryn and her powerful work. With international mindedness driving my instincts, I reached out to her, hoping to provide opportunities for my students to Think global, Act local and engage in quality learning experiences that had been tested and tried by an experienced practitioner of advocacy. Had Bryn not generously shared her pedagogical model, worksheets, lesson plans and resources of Rise Up and Write with me, free of cost, I would perhaps not be writing this today. Had she not been willing to take that risk for a complete stranger, 1000s of miles away, with no way of knowing if it would fit my set of ‘rings’, we would never have stepped out of our tested and tried ‘dance’ and trespassed on to that ‘secret’ wormhole, that changed everything for my learners, my teachers and myself.
Having adapted a range of pedagogical models and resources over the years to ‘fit’ our rings, culture and context, my fellow English teachers of Grades 6–10 began teaching our 6-week English units, Rise Up and Write, in Term 1 of 2020. All through this exciting and challenging collaborative exercise, we, along with out students, also got a chance to learn, share and curate resources for our units on our very own padlet, Rise Up and Write:Writing for Advocacy. We eagerly watched and learned as our students identified the issues that mattered to them and became seriously invested in advocating them through news and social media. I remember when I created an Instagram page for their social media posts, TNS Rise up and write Community and Bryn’s Rise Up and Write was the first page to follow from our Instagram post. She cheered me on as I tagged her in this and that. Likes, Comments and more.
While we, at TNS, were happy to have provided our students with an opportunity to advocate their issues on our Instagram page, we all missed the fact that, unlike Bryn, we couldn’t find local community newspapers that would publish our students’ news media texts. As I surfed through a collection of unpublished news articles by Grade 6; letters to the editor by Grade 7; feature articles by Grade 8; editorials by Grade 9 and speeches by Grade 10, on Managebac, I found each unheard voice yearning for a space, for a platform of publication.
Lock down: To the wormhole
The Pandemic of 2020 hit Pakistan at the end of February 2020 and began to escalate as we put together our final social media texts on the Instagram page and ended the teaching of our first advocacy units, Rise up and write. I distinctly remember, Friday the 13th of March, as the last working day at TNS when life, as we knew it, came to a halt and Virtual teaching and learning took over. Everything changed. It was in the gloom of our lock down that the idea of creating an online digital space to publish our students’ news media texts niggled and then pushed its way through me. I proposed the idea to my home bound DP1 Language A students and we came together as an Editorial team to launch TNS Rise Up and Write, our first Online Magazine for the school, on 20th April, 2020. Check out the video made for an IBPAK contest Think Global Act local and a Walkthrough of the website. This video also shows a Walkthrough of the website TNS Rise up and write.
Our very capable Editorial team not only created a place to publish the news texts created during the teaching of our Rise Up and Write units on our Advocacy@TNS page, but also initiated 4 Covid-19 challenges for students, who were locked in, to help them rise up and write and share their art, their poetry, their advocacy, their quarantales and more.
And so, what Bryn and I started in the first zoom session on 9/11/2019 is now a thriving platform for our whole TNS Community to write, publish and express themselves. Because Bryn was willing to plant these seeds, I like to call them magic beans, in my school yard, they have indeed grown into the huge bean stalk, shooting up, across space and time, to the wormhole of possibilities, where our students have explored the value and power of writing to advocate positive action and strive for meaningful change.
Thank you, Bryn, for reaching out and helping us all Rise up and Write. Thank you, my dear colleagues, for taking on this challenge with me. And, most importantly, thank you to my students, for it continues to be them, the ‘secret sit[ting] in the middle’ of the ‘ring’, who make it possible for wonder junkies, like Bryn and I, to write a story that matters.
