As I was reading about the connected learning movement, I was reminded of my son’s senior year in high school. As a bright neurodivergent teen, my son frequently encountered challenges with working memory and retention in his classes. Consequently, his grades often failed to reflect his ability, leaving him out of sync with his high-achieving peers. He had expressed interest in joining the robotics team at the high school, but the pandemic threw a wrench in those plans, and it wasn’t until his senior year that he could participate in person on the team. To say that the experience was the pinnacle of his k-12 education is an understatement. Even…

This week’s module deeply resonated with me as I have always believed in the power of stories to broaden our perspectives and reshape our understanding of the world around us. I’ve already talked much about storytelling in my previous posts. I shared Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s brilliant TED Talk, “Danger of a Single Story”, which emphasized how the absence of diverse voices can perpetuate existing stereotypes.  I also discussed how our biases are of the “stories we make up about people before we know who they really are” (Lauersen, 2019), and that these false narratives are “mental walls and fences” that are much more difficult to break down than physical walls.…