The Wayfinder

What does it mean to be your best adult self at work? Abril connects with Jennifer Abrams, a communications consultant who supports educators, health care personnel, and others on new employee support, being generationally savvy, effective collaboration skills, having hard conversations, and creating identity-safe workplaces. Their conversation centers the concept of lifelong growth and how this is used as a guiding principle in developmentally-minded organizations like NESA. In practical terms, what does prioritizing adult development look like? How important is it for us to look deeply at ourselves? Join Abril and Jennifer as they explore what it means to curl up to our learning edges in the workplace – and beyond.

How do we measure the school experience from every vantage point? On our first episode of season 2, Abril sits down with David Willows and Suzette Parlevliet of [Yellow Car] to chat about experience strategy, how we can best communicate a school's mission to prospective students/teachers, and felt experience measurements. Willows and Parlevliet close the episode with advice for educators wanting to incorporate experience strategy into their organization's operations.

Welcome to The Wayfinder! Join our Executive Director, Maddy Hewitt, and our podcast host, Abril Soewarso-Rivera, as they dive into the heart of our podcast journey. Let's weather uncharted territory together!

How can we enable students to take their learning outside the four walls of the classroom? On our tenth episode, we sit down with LeeAnne Lavender, a storytelling, service learning and global citizenship educator, to discuss purpose-driven pedagogy, multimedia storytelling projects, and what it means to be a learner alongside your students. 

How do we re-center hope? On our final episode of the season, NESA Executive Director Maddy Hewitt joins Abril in conversation and they discuss regenerative models of education, next year's NESA program, and the case for evidence-based hope.

What does it mean to decolonize the classroom? Join host Abril, reporting from the field, in conversation with Jacinta Williams, a social justice practitioner, as they dive into why we should strive to approach the classroom through a decolonial lens, what we can do to celebrate students’ racial and ethnic identities, and how we can foster meaningful dialogue across difference. 

How can we help our learners connect to nature with their heads, hearts, and hands? Abril sits down with Ivy Yan, a sought-after holistic education practitioner, and they dive into a discussion of Deep Ecology and how it can be woven into modern-day learning.

In this episode, Abril sits down with Raya Bidshahri, the Founder and CEO of the School of Humanity, a breakthrough online high school reinventing what education looks like. Raya works with education providers, governments, investors, and EdTech companies to pave exciting, forward-thinking pathways for our next generation of learners. Abril and Raya discuss the concept of moonshot thinking, what sets the School of Humanity apart, and how we can communicate student success differently.

Join Abril in conversation with Lee Ann Jung, the founder of Lead Inclusion and a clinical professor at San Diego State University. She has consulted with schools in more than 30 countries in the areas of universal design for learning, inclusion, intervention, and mastery assessment and grading. Lee Ann keeps kids at the center of her work, always leading with care, sincerity, and optimism. Abril and Lee Ann discuss meeting the individual needs of each student, re-evaluating metrics of success, and supporting belonging at every level.

In this episode, we connect with Ellen Mahoney, the CEO and Founder of Sea Change Mentoring, an organization that builds mentoring programs for international schools. Ellen’s work thrives in its emphasis on cultivating student wellbeing and providing care and support during important life transitions. Abril and Ellen speak about culturally-sensitive social emotional learning, staying connected as third culture kids, and the idea of collective resilience. After our discussion, we turn to Amina, a grade 1 student from the Schutz American School (SAS) in Alexandria, Egypt, who closes the episode with some earnest thoughts on expressing our feelings and being a good friend.

Join Abril in conversation with Michael Nachbar, the Executive Director of Global Online Academy, a pioneering network of schools and educators who are reimagining learning to thrive in a globally networked society. Michael is a frequent speaker and workshop facilitator at national and international conferences, and presents on such topics as educational trends impacting schools and modern teaching. Abril and Michael discuss how we can call upon AI and emerging technologies to augment teaching and strengthen learning outcomes. After Abril’s conversation with Michael, she connects with John Papadakis, the director of media productions at the American Community Schools of Athens (ACS) to chat about what media literacy means in theory and in practice. ACS high school students, Josie and Stelios, help us close out the episode by offering up their thoughts on how their class on media literacy and productions has expanded their worldview when it comes to ethical consumption in the age of information overload.

How can we keep students in the driver’s seat of their own learning? In this episode, we connect with Tom Schimmer, an education author, speaker, and consultant from Vancouver, Canada. Our host, Abril, speaks with Tom about leveraging student agency, assessment practices that empower young learners, and what it means to ‘scale up’ in schools.