Narrative Atlas

In partnership with MapWorks Learning, Teachers Without Borders and Ushahidi, Narrative Atlas is changing the way youth from various cultures can share and engage with each other around issues they experience everyday.

In partnership with MapWorks Learning, Teachers Without Borders and Ushahidi, Narrative Atlas is changing the way youth from various cultures can share and engage with each other around issues they experience everyday.

Narrative Atlas is a cross-language, open source digital platform through which students and teachers connect and share. Mapping and storytelling serve as mechanisms for young people to explore historical, cultural, and personal narratives while minimizing the language barrier. Students create and share stories using digital media (video, still images, social media, audio, writing), which are displayed on and accessed through a virtual map. In many cases, students use mapping techniques to display their personal narratives (story maps).

Collaborating across borders within Narrative Atlas, young people can:

· explore and study the world

· communicate their ideas

· understand and respect the perspectives of other cultures

· learn to collaborate across cultures, and

· take positive action in their own communities

Whenever possible, they endeavor to explicitly link learning and exploration to the major global challenges of the 21st century that affect us all, such as climate change, energy and environment, and cross-cultural dialogue. MapWorks Learning, with Ushahidi, Teachers Without Borders, and other partners, will provide students and teachers with innovative tools, including online technologies and open education resources, to help them prepare to meet these challenges, both globally and in their own communities.

With teachers and other partners, MapWorks Learning and Ushahidi are developing curricula to support projects in, for example:

· Investigative journalism

· Family and oral history

· Environment (water and air quality, coastal ecological resources, etc.)

· Cross-cultural, community-centered engineering projects