Blog Post #2

PROMPT #1:

  • Identify the three specific stakeholder groups most impacted by your project. For each one, go through the five elements of framework #2 and identify different answers for each group. In other words, if you’re telling your story to stakeholder group #1 (let’s say, middle school students), what is the context that would be most meaningful to that group? What is the catalyst most meaningful to that group? And so on.
  • The centennial school
    • Context: focus on students with neurodivergence or EBD
    • Catalyst: we aim to change the exposure that these students have to the arts
    • Complication: actually entering an arts space can be difficult for these students
    • Change: we create virtual tours using Centennial’s ILC to try to change this issue
    • Consequence: students have had positive feedback with the tours, but we still need to create more and revise them so that they are the most helpful for the students
  • Neurodivergent students and students with EBD
    • Context: students with EBD or neurodivergence have limited access to the arts
    • Catalyst: the development of virtual reality technology makes these spaces more accessible
    • Complication: having a space like the ILC is not always accessible
    • Change: we publish virtual tours online on our website so that students can also access those
    • Consequence: the students have access to these tours from their own home and are able to enter these spaces without having to subject to the fear of overstimulation
  • LUAG
    • Context: focus on the actual arts space that we are capturing a tour of and how we can alter that tour to best meet the needs of students with neurodivergence or EBD
    • Catalyst: the exhibitions switch every semester, so we are able to continually capture different spaces that LUAG provides
    • Complication: as a team, we have to figure out how to best change and alter our tours based on the new exhibitions
    • Change: we create touch points for the students to click on where they can get more information about the pieces in visual or audio form
    • Consequence: the students have enjoyed learning more about the pieces through the touch points and we will continually work with LUAG to publish more tours

PROMPT #2:

  • From the two story frameworks, CHOOSE ONE of them. Doesn’t matter which – choose the one that speaks you to more, or choose randomly. Once you’ve chosen one framework, ignore the other one for this prompt.
  • As a team, write the story of your project (as it exists today), using the five story elements in the order in which they are given, #1 through #5. Each element’s section should consist of at least 2-3 carefully constructed sentences. 
  • The result should be a coherent, beginning-middle-end story about your project which someone of reasonable intelligence who is unfamiliar with your project can follow and understand, and more importantly, be inspired by. The blog entry should be written as a text-based story, not a bulleted list. You should write it as a first-person plural story – in other words, the character is “we,” the project team.
  • Talk it through as a team. Does it make sense? Does it say everything you want and need it to say? If this were the essential structure of your Fall presentations (stretched out to 7 minutes), would it be successful and would the referees know what you were talking about and why? 

Think about the first time you ever entered an art gallery. There are bright lights all around you, people telling you to be quiet, and the expectation to be respectful and stay a safe distance away from the art. There are rules, regulations, and expectations—things that can feel overwhelming for anyone stepping into an art gallery without prior knowledge. These feelings of confusion are representative of the struggles that neurodivergent students experience every day. Children with emotional and behavior disorders (EBD) struggle to connect with arts in the community, sometimes due to lack of exposure but also because of the threat of overstimulation. This problem is widespread throughout the United States, with only seven percent of adults with disabilities ever experiencing an art gallery. We aim to encourage students to experience these unfamiliar places through virtual tours of arts spaces. By creating immersive content for neurodivergent students, they are able to have a connection with the arts within their own school or home environment. These virtual tours are accessible to all through our website, but we directly work with the Centennial School, a K-12 school for students with disabilities, to broadcast these tours to the students. We utilize their Immersive Learning Center (ILC), which is a room with 270° of images and videos projected into their walls. The students are able to experience these arts spaces as if they are actually there, in hopes that more exposure will encourage them to visit these places in person. This has been a slow but inspiring journey; because our project is new, we were only able to accomplish so much. We spent a lot of time working out the logistics of virtual reality technology, using the ILC, and figuring out how best to execute our ideas. Our team has made and published several tours, and the responses from the students we have shown so far have been positive. Ultimately, we have a lot of work to do, but we hope to spread these tours throughout the United States and work more with the Centennial School and its students to figure out how best to help children with neurodivergence or EBD. 

Leave a Reply