Story Swap was founded as a perspective-taking classroom exercise to broaden students’ worldviews through writing. However, it quickly became apparent that the curriculum also addressed schools’ higher needs: breaking down isolation, increasing empathy, and encouraging leadership. Story Swap addresses these needs by using accessible, story-based arts to build empathy, helping participants unlock their potential and change the culture of their schools.

When a swap begins, individuals from different backgrounds come together to form partners and share their stories. Seated face-to-face, participants are asked to tell their partner an essential story from their life that is representative of who they are. They then recreate their partner’s narrative and write the story as if it were their own. By receiving the story of another, recasting it in their own idiom, and, then, exchanging the remixed stories, participants experience the transformative process of walking in one another’s shoes and sharing the view they see from another’s shoes and sharing the view they see from another’s eyes. As they do this, swappers participate in the dismantling of stereotypes and the assembly of understanding. The program is powerful because it harnesses storytelling—the most accessible and universal of all human activities—to open doors of communication.

Problem

Story Swap was founded as a perspective-taking classroom exercise to broaden students’ worldviews through writing. However, it quickly became apparent that the curriculum also addressed schools’ higher needs: breaking down isolation, increasing empathy, and encouraging leadership. The exigency of these needs is born out in the daily headlines and social research on the absence of empathy (i.e. bullying, conflict, violence). The unique characteristics of adolescence—self-consciousness, anxiety about social order, hormonal fluctuations—may also interfere with teens’ known capacity for empathy. Story Swap addresses these needs by using accessible, story-based arts to build empathy, helping participants unlock their potential and change the culture of their schools

Solution

Building on the dozens of successful swaps to date, our goal is to create a pilot program to expand the Story Swap curriculum into as many secondary school classrooms as possible. We have partnered with Aspen High School in Aspen, CO, to build a pilot for national and international expansion. The initiative has two arms: a one-day swap among the schools’ teachers, staff, and administrators (T2T) and a semester-long course in Story Swap for the students (S2S). The T2T swap will be a professional development day, allowing adult participants to earn credit and experience a swap first-hand, which is the initial training step to facilitate the ripple effect of future swaps in their classrooms. The S2S semester will include standards-based creative writing, swaps co-lead by trained teachers, and service learning to raise money for a weeklong student exchange with another school. The outcome of this trial year will be a strategic plan for future expansion throughout the country and beyond.

Example

When a swap begins, individuals from different backgrounds come together to form partners and share their stories. Seated face-to-face, participants are asked to tell their partner an essential story from their life that is representative of who they are. They then recreate their partner’s narrative and write the story as if it were their own. By receiving the story of another, recasting it in their own idiom, and, then, exchanging the remixed stories, participants experience the transformative process of walking in one another’s shoes and sharing the view they see from another’s eyes. As they do this, swappers experience the dismantling of stereotypes and the building of understanding. The program is powerful because it harnesses storytelling—the most accessible and universal of all human activities—to open doors of communication that might otherwise be closed. Because this idea is translated experientially, with students taking charge of their own stories and being responsible for those of others, the empathy learning is particularly accessible and resonant. As Mickey Bergman, director of Middle East Programs at the Aspen Institute affirms: “The program’s model taps into the creativity of youth and engages them not through the lens of their conflict, but rather through their storytelling and listening. The methodology allows participants to genuinely take in perspectives without the ‘threatening’ proposition of agreeing with one another.”

Marketplace

In Aspen’s Roaring Fork Valley, there is no other arts-based, empathy-building program. As a matter of course, when we enter new areas, we survey existing services that address empathy-building and story-based arts, so that Story Swap may enhance and quickly integrate into the established educational landscape. So far we have not encountered any “competition” and preliminary data indicates that Story Swap may be unique in the field. Experts working in education and empathy, including Sam Chaltain, a national education scholar/speaker, informed us that they knew of no other organization doing this type of work on this scale. We will welcome learning from peers as we discover them.