World Story Exchange partners with schools and educational organizations to offer documentary storytelling workshops to youth ages 7-23.  Our workshops invite students to explore their lives, their dreams, their concerns, while finding their creative voice using a variety of media tools and artistic approaches.  We teach photography, filmmaking, writing, painting and drawing - all from a documentary perspective with ethnographic ethics.

 

The students' finished stories are then shared with their local community before being shared with a group of students in another part of the world.  The second group of students then responds by making their own documentary stories through a World Story Exchange workshop.  

 

In this way students learn about the world not from mass-media representations, but directly from the eyes and minds of their peers.  Our workshops provide a space for young people to think critically about their communities, to imagine change, and to value their ideas for how the world could be.