Dream Traveler is a storytelling model that uses purposeful play to initiate creative collaboration and meaningful exchange to help guide youth toward self-empowerment.
Purposeful play provides opportunities for inquiry-based learning, during which children explore answers to their questions through hands-on interaction with materials, build their questioning skills, and enhance their understanding of key academic concepts. A recent research summary for the Minnesota Children’s Museum “The Power of Play” supports these findings: “In the short and long term, play benefits cognitive, social, emotional, and physical development…When play is fun and child-directed, children are motivated to engage in opportunities to learn,” researcher Dr. Rachel E. White concluded.
Gamification uses an empathy-based approach (such as design thinking) for introducing, transforming and operating a service system that allows players to enter a game-full experience to support value creation for the players and other stakeholders. My goal is to impart skills to aid self-regulation and promote creative problem solving while inspiring empowerment. Using mental visualization exercises and prompts to assist and inspire story conception, youth are taught to breath, focus, and recognize how to regulate control over their bodies, thoughts, and responses.
An important consideration of Dream Traveler is the construction of a ready-to-use toolbox. Designed to assist and inspire parents and educators, who do not feel they have the imagination or creative talent to work with youth in this manner. Engaging with Dream Traveler enables dreamers to question the world around them, develop problem-solving skills, gain critical awareness, and participate in opportunities to effectively make decisions necessary to create personal change. A meaningful dialog, even guised within a fantastical story can cover countless topics of concern as they flow in and out of an experience fashioned around purposeful play.
Methodology:
•facilitate authentic exchange
•initiate purposeful play and deeply noticing with collaboration to meaningfully guide youth toward empowerment, self-regulation, and creative problem- solving skills?
•Applications: Deeper Learning, Deeply Noticing, Mindfulness, Purposeful Play, and Storytelling.
What is it?
Dream Traveler, is an interactive storytelling model born of a rich lineage in storytelling, bridges past and contemporary notions through the use of: mental visualization exercises, prompts to assist and inspire story conception, and actualization through drawing.
The examination of dreams alongside authentic and meaningful exchange, were key themes used to explore my prototype. The focus to initiate purposeful play and deeply noticing with creative collaboration and meaningful exchange to help guide youth toward self-empowerment.
A meaningful dialog, even guised within a fantastical story, can cover countless topics of concern as they flow in and out of an experience fashioned around purposeful play.
Why / how it is useful / important
•My empowerment process model is guided by the following principles: articulating empowerment as a connected and recurring progression of exchange, identifying core elements of that process, and defining the process in a way that is useful to both participants and practitioners.
Participants share in a hands-on process of creative expression. Youth, entire families, and educators can engage with Dream Traveler through playful prompt inspired conversations that enable a means of self-exploration. This enables dreamers to question the world around them, develop problem-solving skills, gain critical awareness, and participate in opportunities to effectively make decisions necessary to create personal change. Engaging individuals within a collaborative environment, ie via guided meditations delivered as story teach breathing, focus, and relaxation skills.
Benefits :
The art of storytelling inspires the power of personal story and helps communicate and connect one with life experiences.
Story is a central fixture included in almost every detail we experience. Owning your story and honoring vulnerabilities that occur with the sharing of personal story helps create an environment that invites empathetic values into a global community.
Dream Traveler initiates purposeful play to encourage individuals to embrace imperfections, accept and grow from mistakes, and recognize how to regulate control over their bodies, thoughts, and responses.
An important consideration of the Dream Traveler model is the construction of a ready-to-use toolbox, designed to assist and encourage parents, educators, coaches and other adults, who do not feel they have the imagination or creative talents to work with youth, in this manner.
