Connected Stories | UPSD The Belonging Project Ecosystem

The Unity Pathways School Division (UPSD) and its schools are narrative settings created for The Belonging Project. The stories within this ecosystem are inspired by real experiences in education and community life, thoughtfully fictionalized to protect privacy and illuminate inclusive practice.

▶ Story: From Fixing to Flourishing: A Schoolwide Shift

Course: Strength-Based Practice: Seeing Students Differently

At Harvest Hills Elementary, the staff has grown weary. Every meeting, every document, every report card seems to focus on what’s broken. Despite best intentions, their language has become saturated with terms like “needs support,” “below expectations,” and “lacks focus.” Even when students are celebrated, it’s usually for overcoming deficits rather than expressing their strengths. The mood is heavy. The vision feels dim.

But a question starts to rise, quietly at first, then with momentum: What if we started from what’s strong instead of what’s missing?

It begins as a small idea of just a group of staff members participating in a collaborative inquiry project on strength-based conferencing. But the idea spreads. Educators begin observing differently, listening more closely, and involving families in new ways. They recognize the power of starting meetings not with gaps, but with gifts. Learner profiles are rewritten with language that celebrates complexity, purpose, and potential.

What began as a pilot becomes a school-wide movement. Classrooms begin shifting their documentation practices. Students co-develop portfolios that reflect who they are becoming—not just where they are struggling. Family nights take on a new tone, centering stories, hopes, and shared visions for growth.

As the year unfolds, the mood in the school changes. There’s more laughter, more ownership, more clarity about who each learner is. And perhaps most powerfully, staff find that when strengths are made visible, even challenges feel more workable because they are grounded in relationship and trust.

By the time they draft their guidebook, they realize they haven’t just piloted a new strategy, they’ve created a new culture.

Prologue - Enough About What’s Broken ( 📖 Read | 🎧 Listen | 🎬 Watch )
Chapter 1 - Observing With a New Lens ( 📖 Read | 🎧 Listen | 🎬 Watch )
Chapter 2 - Changing the Meeting ( 📖 Read | 🎧 Listen | 🎬 Watch )
Chapter 3 - Profiles That Uplift ( 📖 Read | 🎧 Listen | 🎬 Watch )
Chapter 4 - Design in Action ( 📖 Read | 🎧 Listen | 🎬 Watch )
Epilogue - From Pilot to Practice ( 📖 Read | 🎧 Listen | 🎬 Watch )

▶ Story: Amara's Story: The Multimodal Social Studies Unit

Course: Visual and Multimodal Teaching Strategies

Meet Amara, a passionate and reflective Grade 4 teacher at Harvest Hill Elementary School. New to the school and eager to build meaningful connections with her students, Amara quickly realizes that her classroom is home to a richly diverse group of learners. May of her students are multilingual, some with ADHD or learning differences, and others who simply don’t connect with traditional, text-heavy instruction. When she launches her first major social studies unit, she’s met with blank stares, off-task behavior, and growing frustration. Despite her best intentions, she sees how a one-size-fits-all approach is leaving many students behind.

Feeling disheartened, Amara begins to question the role of modality in her teaching. Could the problem be not just what she is teaching, but how? A professional learning workshop on multimodal strategies opens a new path forward. She begins experimenting with layered input: visual timelines, physical modeling, and storytelling techniques. As students become more animated and participatory, Amara leans deeper into multimodal design.

Throughout the unit, she redesigns assessments to include sketch-noting, tableau performances, and video explainers. Students who rarely spoke up begin to lead discussions. Visual prompts and task anchors support greater independence and reduce the need for constant redirection. By the end of the unit, Amara’s classroom feels transformed, not because the content changed, but because the pathways into the content were multiplied.

Her culminating museum walk isn’t just a celebration of student learning. It's a turning point in Amara’s teaching identity. She no longer sees multimodal strategies as add-ons for “struggling” students. Instead, she sees them as core to creating a classroom where all learners can access, express, and feel proud of their growth.

Prologue - The Text Wall ( 📖 Read | 🎧 Listen | 🎬 Watch )
Chapter 1 - First Shifts in Vision ( 📖 Read | 🎧 Listen | 🎬 Watch )
Chapter 2 - A Unit Reimagined ( 📖 Read | 🎧 Listen | 🎬 Watch )
Chapter 3 - Creative Expression ( 📖 Read | 🎧 Listen | 🎬 Watch )
Chapter 4 - Visuals for Independence ( 📖 Read | 🎧 Listen | 🎬 Watch )
Epilogue - The Museum Walk ( 📖 Read | 🎧 Listen | 🎬 Watch )

▶ Story: Jin's Story: A Newcomer Learns with His Hands

Course: Visual and Multimodal Teaching Strategies

Jin, a recent immigrant from South Korea, joins the Grade 6 class at Harvest Hill Elementary School in the middle of the school year. With limited English proficiency and little familiarity with Canadian classroom routines, he enters each day quietly, eyes down, barely speaking. His teacher, Ms. Cameron, wants to support him but feels unsure of how to balance language learning with curriculum coverage. Jin’s math scores from his previous school are strong, but he seems hesitant to participate, even when tasks seem nonverbal. The barrier isn’t ability. It’s access.

At first, Ms. Cameron assumes that more one-on-one support is the answer. But Jin continues to withdraw. When she attends a professional learning session on multimodal instruction, she begins to wonder if it’s not about simplifying language but about diversifying modes. What if Jin could learn through doing, seeing, touching, and moving?

With that mindset, the classroom begins to shift. Gestures and visuals accompany spoken directions. Lessons integrate manipulatives and tactile models. Vocabulary is introduced through visual word banks and dual-language supports. Slowly, Jin begins to lean in, then participate. His thinking, once hidden behind the silence of a new language, becomes visible through models, diagrams, and peer collaboration.

By the end of the unit, Jin is confidently sharing his learning through movement, drawing, and even a narrated video in his home language. His journey isn’t just one of language acquisition. It's a story of how multimodal design can remove barriers, honor identity, and allow students to show what they know in ways that feel natural and empowering.

Prologue - The Language Barrier ( 📖 Read | 🎧 Listen | 🎬 Watch )
Chapter 1 - Welcome Through Movement ( 📖 Read | 🎧 Listen | 🎬 Watch )
Chapter 2 - Making Connections Visible ( 📖 Read | 🎧 Listen | 🎬 Watch )
Chapter 3 - Showing What He Knows ( 📖 Read | 🎧 Listen | 🎬 Watch )
Chapter 4 - Gaining Confidence ( 📖 Read | 🎧 Listen | 🎬 Watch )
Epilogue - Multilingual Pride ( 📖 Read | 🎧 Listen | 🎬 Watch )

▶ Story: Samir's Story: Tactile Paths to Participation

Course: Understanding Access Methods and Designing Access Points

When Samir, a blind Grade 1 student, joins Ms. Wren’s classroom at Harvest Hill Elementary mid-year, the team is excited to welcome him—but quickly recognizes that inclusion requires more than goodwill. Ms. Wren realizes her current classroom setup, materials, and routines are largely inaccessible to a student who cannot rely on visual cues. Worksheets dominate her instruction, centers rely on pictures, and transitions are marked with visual prompts alone. While she has a strong desire to make learning inclusive, she doesn’t yet know how.

Instead of relying on generic accommodations, Ms. Wren begins a collaborative journey. She reaches out to the school’s learning support teacher and connects with a Teacher for the Visually Impaired (TVI), opening up new possibilities for design. With their help, she begins to recognize the difference between simply modifying tasks and intentionally designing access from the start.

Over the course of the story, Samir’s experience becomes a catalyst for transformation—not only for Ms. Wren’s classroom but for the broader school community. Through tactile tools, spatial orientation strategies, collaborative exploration, and multisensory learning routines, Samir becomes an active, confident participant. Peers shift from curiosity to genuine partnership, learning to communicate and collaborate in new ways. Other students begin to benefit from the multimodal changes too—particularly those with language processing difficulties, ADHD, and emerging language skills.

This is not just a story of adapting for one child; it’s a story of how deeply inclusive practice begins with a commitment to understanding access and grows into a classroom culture rooted in creativity, collaboration, and equity.

Prologue - A New Lens on Math ( 📖 Read | 🎧 Listen | 🎬 Watch )
Chapter 1 - Listening Differently ( 📖 Read | 🎧 Listen | 🎬 Watch )
Chapter 2 - Designing for Engagement ( 📖 Read | 🎧 Listen | 🎬 Watch )
Chapter 3 - Partnering for Growth ( 📖 Read | 🎧 Listen | 🎬 Watch )
Chapter 4 - Whole-Class Inclusion ( 📖 Read | 🎧 Listen | 🎬 Watch )
Epilogue - A Classroom That Sees Differently ( 📖 Read | 🎧 Listen | 🎬 Watch )

▶ Story: The Dino Lens: Designing Through Deep Interests

Course: Understanding Access Methods and Designing Access Points

Nia is a vibrant Grade 3 student at Harvest Hill Elementary with a deep, unwavering fascination for dinosaurs. Her interest is encyclopedic. She can rattle off species names, habitat facts, and timelines with ease. But in the classroom, her love of dinosaurs often becomes a point of friction. Teachers struggle to redirect her when activities shift focus, and peers sometimes grow frustrated when she brings dinosaurs into every conversation. Her educators find themselves torn: should they try to pull her away from her singular focus, or embrace it as a strength?

During a planning meeting, Nia’s support team, including her classroom teacher, educational assistant, and learning support teacher, begin to look at her through a new lens. With input from her family, they realize that her passion isn’t just a preference; it’s a source of comfort, regulation, and meaning. It helps her navigate sensory overload and social ambiguity. Instead of treating her interest as a limitation, they begin to treat it as a bridge, a way to connect Nia to broader learning and shared classroom experiences.

What follows is a gradual, thoughtful transformation in how learning is designed. The team integrates her dinosaur knowledge into math, literacy, and science lessons, using it as a launching pad rather than a constraint. They introduce predictable routines, co-regulation strategies, and scaffolds that help Nia expand into new areas while staying grounded in what she loves. Over time, she begins to collaborate with peers, explore adjacent topics, and share her learning with confidence. Her story shows that true access sometimes begins not with redirection, but with recognition: of who a child is, what brings them joy, and how that joy can unlock potential.

Prologue - Why Is It Always Dinosaurs? ( 📖 Read | 🎧 Listen | 🎬 Watch )
Chapter 1 - Reframing Nia’s Strengths ( 📖 Read | 🎧 Listen | 🎬 Watch )
Chapter 2 - Designing Access Through Interests ( 📖 Read | 🎧 Listen | 🎬 Watch )
Chapter 3 - Expanding the Learning Horizon ( 📖 Read | 🎧 Listen | 🎬 Watch )
Chapter 4 - Sharing and Collaborating ( 📖 Read | 🎧 Listen | 🎬 Watch )
Epilogue - Dinosaurs Brought Me Here ( 📖 Read | 🎧 Listen | 🎬 Watch )

▶ Story: Kamara's Story: Co-Regulation in Action

Course: Safety, Regulation, and Connection in Classrooms

Meet Kamara, a Grade 4 student at Harvest Hill Elementary School, whose learning journey has been shaped by a history of developmental trauma. She is quick to react, often overwhelmed by classroom noise, sudden changes, or perceived threats. Seemingly small events (a group partner disagreement, a substitute teacher, a missed routine) can result in explosive outbursts or complete shutdowns. These moments disrupt the learning environment, but they also leave Kamara feeling ashamed, misunderstood, and emotionally isolated.

Her teacher, Ms. Evans, and educational assistant, Jordan, care deeply and work hard to support her. But despite implementing traditional behavior plans, token systems, and consequence ladders, they remain stuck in a cycle of crisis and recovery. Each new strategy feels like a temporary fix, and the emotional toll is mounting for everyone involved. Kamara is frequently pulled from class, and her presence in the classroom begins to feel fragile. Still, Ms. Evans and Jordan sense that beneath the volatility is a child who deeply wants to belong.

The turning point begins not with a new intervention, but with a shift in perspective. Through professional development and honest reflection, the team starts to explore co-regulation, not as a behavior management tactic, but as a foundation for connection and safety. As they begin adapting the environment instead of expecting Kamara to fit the mold, something shifts. Transitions are softened. Tools for self-regulation are made available to all students. Vulnerability replaces control, and Kamara is gradually invited into a new kind of relationship with her team, with her classroom, and with herself.

This story traces Kamara’s journey (and her team’s) as they move from reactive strategies to intentional, relational, inclusive design. It's about more than managing behavior. It’s about creating a space where students who carry invisible wounds can feel safe enough to stay, connect, and learn.

Prologue - The Breaking Point ( 📖 Read | 🎧 Listen | 🎬 Watch )
Chapter 1 - Reading the Storm ( 📖 Read | 🎧 Listen | 🎬 Watch )
Chapter 2 - Designing for Safety ( 📖 Read | 🎧 Listen | 🎬 Watch )
Chapter 3 - Safe Together ( 📖 Read | 🎧 Listen | 🎬 Watch )
Chapter 4 - Learning, Finally ( 📖 Read | 🎧 Listen | 🎬 Watch )
Epilogue - A Classroom That Breathes ( 📖 Read | 🎧 Listen | 🎬 Watch )

▶ Story: Confidence in Two Languages

Course: Flexible Grouping and Learning Pathways

Confidence in Two Languages

Meet Paulina, a Grade 5 student at Harvest Hill Elementary School who is learning English as an additional language (EAL). Soft-spoken and observant, Paulina understands much more than she says. Her ideas are rich and insightful, but language barriers and unfamiliar peer dynamics often keep her from sharing them in class. She spends most group work passively listening or completing tasks alone, not because she doesn’t have something to contribute but because the structures don’t yet invite her in.

When her teacher begins experimenting with flexible grouping strategies that honour identity, first language, and student strengths, Paulina’s classroom experience changes. She is paired with peers who value her contributions and is offered ways to express her thinking beyond English-only discussion. As her confidence grows, so does her leadership and by year’s end, Paulina becomes a quiet but powerful voice within the classroom community.

Prologue - More Than Translation ( 📖 Read | 🎧 Listen | 🎬 Watch )
Chapter 1 - Identity-Aware Grouping ( 📖 Read | 🎧 Listen | 🎬 Watch )
Chapter 2 - Student Strength Planning ( 📖 Read | 🎧 Listen | 🎬 Watch )
Chapter 3 - Collaboration That Uplifts ( 📖 Read | 🎧 Listen | 🎬 Watch )
Chapter 4 - Pathways to Expression ( 📖 Read | 🎧 Listen | 🎬 Watch )
Epilogue - A New Kind of Leader ( 📖 Read | 🎧 Listen | 🎬 Watch )

▶ Story: A Voice Through Touch

Course: Learner Agency and Voice: Moving Beyond Compliance

A Voice Through Touch

Marisol is a bright, non-speaking Grade 2 student who communicates using a touch-based AAC device. She recently transitioned from a specialized setting in another division into an inclusive classroom at Harvest Hill Elementary. While her new teachers are welcoming and committed, they initially feel uncertain about how to meaningfully include Marisol’s voice in day-to-day classroom life. Most communication with Marisol is limited to basic needs, and while she is physically present, her participation feels peripheral. Group tasks, classroom discussions, and journaling time often move forward without her input, not out of neglect, but because routines haven’t been designed with her communication in mind.

That begins to shift when Marisol’s teacher, Ms. Holtz, attends a professional learning session on communication diversity. She begins to see that Marisol’s silence is not a lack of voice but a signal that the environment isn’t yet offering consistent, dignified entry points for expression. Ms. Holtz and the learning team start redesigning their classroom routines to center Marisol’s voice, not just accommodate it.

They begin by embedding low-risk, high-frequency choices throughout the day. This allows Marisol to contribute to classroom decisions using her device. Soon, classroom voting, graphing, and circle times are adapted to include her input. Visuals and core vocabulary boards are added to whiteboard prompts, and students are explicitly taught how to wait for and respond to AAC-based contributions. Marisol’s classmates start picking up her symbols, gestures, and rhythms, building a new classroom culture around multimodal communication.

As weeks go by, Marisol becomes an active participant in group work, a contributor to shared writing, and a collaborator in creative projects. One day, the class works together to design a mural based on everyone’s ideas, including Marisol’s suggestion of “a big tree where we all fit.” Her classmates light up at the idea, and it becomes the centerpiece of the mural. Marisol’s story is no longer one of accommodation. It is a story of co-creation, shared learning, and agency through touch.

Prologue - The Silent Contributor ( 📖 Read | 🎧 Listen | 🎬 Watch )
Chapter 1 - Rethinking Participation ( 📖 Read | 🎧 Listen | 🎬 Watch )
Chapter 2 - Designing for Input ( 📖 Read | 🎧 Listen | 🎬 Watch )
Chapter 3 - Elevating Expression ( 📖 Read | 🎧 Listen | 🎬 Watch )
Chapter 4 - Building Belonging By Voice ( 📖 Read | 🎧 Listen | 🎬 Watch )
Epilogue - Agency Beyond the Device ( 📖 Read | 🎧 Listen | 🎬 Watch )

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This is not just a story of adapting for one child; it’s a story of how deeply inclusive practice begins with a commitment to understanding access and grows into a classroom culture rooted in creativity, collaboration, and equity.

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