Kingdom schools is a school for the children of the elite and wealthy of Saudi Arabia. All core subjects are taught by western teachers for whom English is their native language. Prior to the 2019-2020 academic year, staff turnover was high. Perhaps due to this lack of structure and inconsistent teacher expectations, student behaviour was poor. The school moral code was developed and implemented in 2019 to better support the instilling of appropriate behaviours. Since then, staff turnover has remained consistently low and student behaviours in and out of the classroom have improved.
The MORALS, displayed as statements, are an acronym for the behaviours expected of students. The morals were designed to support student well-being. Each fortnight the moral focus changes; throughout daily morning well-being time, the moral is unpacked and the fortnightly assemblies, led by different teachers, incorporates a lesson based around the moral focus. Throughout the year teachers and the principal’s award students for demonstrating certain morals. The school morals are below.
I am empathetic
I take ownership
I am respectful & resilience
I have acceptance & adaptability
I love to learn
I am successful
Each year, returning staff members run the first term’s assemblies. This provides new staff with an opportunity to develop an understanding of the morals and the expectations of assemblies. The library, as part of the boy’s upper primary and middle school (grades four to nine), supports the academic, social and emotional development of each student. Thus, the first in a series of interactive stories have been written to determine its potential success. Furthermore, as learning still takes place at home due to Covid-19, the interactive stories will be available for students online (Felvegi & Matthew, 2012, p. 40).
As a returning staff member, the librarian has developed an ‘I am empathetic’ moral resource in the form of an entertaining and educational interactive story (Green & Jenkins, 2014, p. 280). For students to demonstrate a moral, they and their teachers must first understand it. Empathy is a difficult concept for students to grasp and is often confused with sympathy. As such, the interactive digital story has been written to guide students in better identifying empathetic behaviours and therefore demonstrating them themselves. The interactive story will be used for students from grades four to nine, therefore, the included imagery was created to be relevant and accessible to all students. The school insignia is the apostrophe mark and as we are all members of the school, sharing a vision and purpose, the apostrophe was used to represent people within the interactive story. This allows accessibility for younger students and ensures that none of the images are too confronting.
Throughout the ‘I am empathetic’ fortnight, students will utilise five minutes during the morning check-in time to interact with the digital story and as a class discuss the situations which arise in the story. The story involves the student as the main character and places them in various real-life scenarios. The story guides the students to select the empathetic choice. This is made possible through the creation of rule-based loops that remove unempathetic options once they have been selected. Each option offers an opportunity for the student to demonstrate empathy, sympathy or indifference, thus allowing students to make real-life choices as though they are the character (Miller, 2009). The scenarios encountered in the interactive story are sadness, hurt, anxiety and loneliness.
The interactive story, written on Inklewriter, is not simply the scanning of a print book. The digital elements take it to a new level (Yokota & Teale, 2014). Its creation is purely digital and utilises digital-only elements. This includes the creation of loops, where after selecting an unempathetic response, the reader is looped back to the scenario and the corresponding response is removed. If printed, these elements would cease to function and draw away from the reader’s experience.
The interactive story I am eMpathetic (Bell, 2021) can be read here.
References:
Bell, C. (2021). I am eMpathetic. Inklewriter. https://www.inklewriter.com/stories/79840
Felvégi, E., & Matthew, K. I. (2012). Ebooks and literacy in K-12 schools. Computers in the Schools, 29(1-2), 40-52. https://doi.org/10.1080/07380569.2012.651421
Green, M. C., & Jenkins, K. M. (2014). Interactive narratives: Processes and outcomes in user-directed stories: Interactive narratives. Journal of Communication, 64(3), 479-500. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12093
Miller, C. H. (2009). The new frontier of web-based stories: An expert in the field offers a primer on some of the ways you can expand your storytelling horizons. The Writer (Boston), 122(8), 42.
Yokota, J. & Teale, W. H. (2014). Picture books and the digital world: Educators making informed choices. The Reading Teacher, 67(8), 577-585. https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.1262