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Aaron Moniz is the co-founder, director, and lead facilitator of Inspire Citizens which started in 2018. Aaron grew up in a small town in Canada and then moved to Abu Dhabi and experienced diversity and interculturalism first-hand. He focuses on social issues, human rights, anti-racism and anti-homophobia, environmentalism, animal rights, etc. through Punk.
What is Your WHY NOW
My WHY is to make sure that as many students and families around the world get to engage with global issues, develop empathy for people and the planet, and use their learning to be able to take action, at any time. My WHY is to inspire as many people as possible to believe that taking action to make a difference is always an option and that our collective agency can help shape the world.
I do this by dedicating myself to global citizenship education and by working with students, educators, school leaders, school stakeholders, and community partners around the globe to build systems based on sustainable development and global citizenship education.
EMPATHY to IMPACT: Understanding and enacting this process has the power to positively influence everything.
Share about Your Education and How You Became a Teacher
I started in a very different place than I ended up. My academic and professional career began with a desire to do good and influence the world positively through politics. I quickly learned that Political Science was not the right field, but I fell in love with Psychology. I completed my Bachelor of Science in Psychology specializing in Buddhism and Psychology and Minors in Political Science and English Literature. I was enthralled by mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, Buddhism and psychoanalysis, and all the wisdom around using the mind to heal the mind. I felt compelled to investigate how creating the right conditions might help people reach their full potential and make wise decisions so the world is a better place. This whole experience taught me that at 20 years old, I was not ready to go into clinical psychology. The best way for me to help minds reach their full potential while also being an advocate for inclusion was to go into psychology and education. So my journey began as an intern in a special education department of an international school in Casablanca, Morocco. Within the first week of my experience, a teacher had to leave, I was asked to step in and support an 8th-grade math class and that was it. I was hooked on the beauty of education, and the puzzle of helping students to reach their full potential.
After this, I decided to do 3 more concurrent degrees in education while teaching full-time. I was able to complete my B.Ed and M.Ed with The College of New Jersey. After being promoted to the head of learning support, EAL, Remedial Reading, and Talented and Gifted, I sought further professional certification in Special Education virtually at the University of Victoria during the year and summers.
Developing Inclusive Education and Experiential Learning
While developing my skillset in inclusive education, I started getting more involved in experiential learning, service learning with Berber populations in the High Atlas Mountains, and partnering with local NGOs like Corps Africa to link community development projects to Talented and Gifted projects, experiential learning programs, and to the curriculum. I recall sitting on the mud/cement roof of a home staring at the sun setting over the 4000m mountains, reflecting on my experience and the impact that this work was having on our students, and I remember saying to myself, “why can’t all school be like this..?”
After my time in Morocco ended, I accepted a position at the International School of Beijing, a respected international school in China with a well-developed learning support and inclusive education program. This is where Steve Sostak and I met as co-teachers on the 6th-grade team.
Meeting Steve changed my life.
Not only was he my older ‘twin’ punk rock, tattooed, educator, but we shared the same vision for inclusive education and action-based global citizenship education. We taught together on the grade 6 team for a year and we moved to the Future’s Academy within the International School of Beijing.
Futures Academy was a school within the middle that was dedicated to all subjects interdisciplinary project-based learning that was service and action-focused and embedded design thinking, real-world learning, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Students would have 10-12 weeks to solve a driving question and use a PBL cycle, learning from their content area, individualized learning programs, flexible learning spaces, and teachers as facilitators to help students move toward their final summative action or sharing of learning. My experience as an inclusive specialist and program leader in this kind of program prepared me for co-planning, collaboration, curriculum design, program design, and consulting. That experience also gave me many of the skills I needed to help schools build systems and structures to support global citizenship education programs.
The Turning Point For You and Steve
Our real turning point that started Inspire Citizens was when Steve and I chaperoned our youth media and digital advocacy team at a Global Issues Network (GIN) conference.
Steve looked at me and said, “Why is it that global issues education gets ONE weekend, only for the kids who can afford to travel, who aren’t in a different club, and then after the conference, we all go back to schools that don’t embrace the concept, and nothing more gets done? Why isn’t all teaching and learning based on this?”
This was a defining moment for us both. We pondered for about 48 hours. We saw the impact this type of teaching and learning had on students. We knew that we had the tools and resources that could easily be integrated into existing subject areas and get deeper engagement with the content area, we knew what it meant to build programs, and we knew that there were tens of thousands of educators asking the same questions, never finding answers.
So the next day Steve told me he was resigning and asked if I was in. We knew that there was nothing more important than dedicating ourselves to this work and our full energy and professional skills to INSPIRING people to be good CITIZENS of the world.
And … Inspire Citizens was born.
Let’s Go Back and Talk about Being a Third Culture Kid and Punk
I grew up in a small town in Northern Ontario. My life started in a town with 800 people, born in the closest hospital about 4 hours away. Although I loved growing up in nature, playing hockey, engaging in winter sports, biking, hiking, fishing, snowboarding, cross-country skiing, swimming, kayaking, canoeing, etc. the town was not the most diverse or promising of places. You either made it big playing hockey or you got a job at the mine or the mill. My parents, who I love dearly and who are amazing educators who influenced my life significantly and shaped who I am today, decided that they needed a change and heard about something called “international teaching’. They attended a weekend job fair in Toronto and before I knew it, they called home saying we were moving to Abu Dhabi. At the time, I thought that that was a fictional town from Garfield, and I quickly realized that it was a real place, a buzzing Muslim metropolis of about 1 million people at the time, within a few months, my sibling, my parents, and I were off to the United Arab Emirates.
Having never really had many friends that were ‘different than me’ and only ever knowing the small-town bush life, the first 8-9 months of living in the UAE were a challenge. Soon I found my punk rockers, my skater friends, my friends through sports, my classmates began to grow on me, and by the end of year 1, I felt at home in this international life.
Being a Third Culture Kid (TCK) is when you were raised in one ‘culture’, you move to another that you assimilate to, but you’re not really part of either, and thus a resultant third culture experience begins to form. For some, this leads to loss, confusion, and a desire to return to a ‘home state’. For some, this helps us to understand that the world is a beautiful place, and the more you listen, experience, learn, embrace, and find beauty, the more that the whole world becomes your gift and thus, your ‘home’. My experience growing up in Abu Dhabi shaped my understanding of self and instilled the joy of living with and learning from others. I developed the ability to see the beauty and challenge, in so many different contexts and circumstances and, ultimately it sparked this desire to help everyone see the beauty in the people and planet we share. I think this began my quest toward intercultural understanding and shaped the curiosity that later became the foundation and values for global citizenship.
I come from a musical family. My parents almost home-schooled us from a van so my dad could go on tour. But we did grow up in a home where Dad’s band was jamming (practicing), we had access to all the instruments, amps, and PA systems we could need, we would attend concerts and events frequently, and there was always an acoustic guitar around the fire or a band playing a party. When I turned the ripe age of 9, after many years of singing in the choir, my dad asked me, “Which instrument do you want for your birthday?” Not if I wanted one, just which one. 🙂 And of course, I chose the coolest one; drums.
By this time I had gone through my alternative, rock, and nu-metal stage, and was finding out about a new genre called PUNK. It started with Blink 182 and the pop-punk bands. It then morphed into bands like NOFX, Rancid, Propagandhi, and Pennywise, and moved more into Street Punk, Ska-Core, and Hardcore Punk like A Global Threat, The Casualties, The Unseen, The Virus, The Misfits (Danzig era of course), Leftover Crack, Choking Victim, Minor Threat, Black Flag, Bad Brains, Poison Idea, and many, many more. This was just by the end of high school. It got progressively more hardcore since then.
Some bands are more political than others. Some are more mature and eloquent than others. But what unites most people in punk is that the lyrics are about unity, anti-racism, animal rights, anti-homophobia, ending war and violence, speaking out against human rights violations, and just speaking to liberty and rights that we all fundamentally deserve… well SCREAMING it.
Slowly, the values from punk rock started seeping into my middle school essays and research projects, influencing me to get into the student council and become involved in youth municipal groups. It appeared in my service projects in high school, and eventually, they formed and molded my heart and mind to the point that I wanted to live a life of advocacy, justice, engaged politics, and social action.
Since I was 9 years old, I have been in 36 bands in the last 26 years. I have played in punk, rock, ska, reggae, hip-hop, crossover, grindcore, death metal, black metal, hardcore punk, and power-violence bands. We played in one of the first-ever punk bands in the UAE, influenced a pretty strong hardcore punk period in Morocco, and played in some cool bands in Canada, China, and Korea. My bands have toured/played in about 30 different countries and hundreds of shows, and I’ve probably released about 40 records since my first one at age 12/13. Loud and fast music has been my flow state, my safe place, my source of creativity, my source of social groups, my challenge, my cardio, and my ticket to meet and see into the lives of so many amazing people.
Growing up in punk exposed me to certain issues that shaped my values and my worldview. It taught me that life is about standing up for what you believe and about mobilizing communities to come together and take action. This belief and set of values ultimately shaped who I am today; someone who actively contributes to creating a more harmonious future. This happened by setting up school systems for global citizenship and inspiring students, educators, and school leaders to believe we can make a positive impact together. We just have to be more intentional with why we teach and how we turn learning into action.
If the Punks are united, we will never be divided.
Recognizing Steve Sostak
I would love to take a moment to recognize Steve Sostak, his contributions to my life, and all he gave to the Inspire Citizens family and the world. Steve was a visionary and spoke to the hearts of so many people. His empathy was evident in everything he did and why he cared so deeply for the world.
Although he is no longer with us, everyone whose life he touched will continue to feel his ripple effects. Even though his leaf has finally fallen from the tree, he now nourishes the soil so that many other plants can grow and contribute much-needed oxygen to everyone around the world. I am so grateful to have met him, built this organization with him, and had him as a friend.
Continuing with the ‘drummer motif’, Inspire Citizens was our ‘touring band’. In the early days, we ran Inspire Citizens like we both ran our punk rock bands in the past (shows, fliers, DIY, T-shirts, and Merch, touring hard, ‘play for food’, growing our audiences wider and wider, and making sure that every record or show was better than the last).
Although our band has lost a frontman, I will continue to play the beat we created together and share the ‘anthems of change’ with the world. I miss him dearly, but he sits wrapped in gratitude and with pride in my heart.
Share what Inspire Citizen does for students, educators, schools, and stories
Ultimately our goal is: as many sustained whole-school transformations as possible… but we also engage schools and educators in other ways with the hope that we lead people and schools toward whole-school models or support people along the way if their school is not ready to embrace a whole-school approach, YET.
Many schools have a mission or vision that includes developing global citizens or students who take action for a brighter future, but few have an articulated approach to how they do this, or evidence that it is happening. We help schools to unpack and articulate that mission into tools, resources, and approaches. We then ensure that these approaches can integrate into existing implications for the school like curriculum, assessment, reporting, and complementary strategic initiatives, and are not being ‘added on’ to existing initiatives. From there, we develop an implementation roadmap considering the leadership structure of the school, building capacity on-site, socializing the tools and strategies to all school stakeholders, and selecting manageable first implementation groups or early adopter teams.
Once the implementation plan is clear with key individuals and roles and responsibilities, then we begin implementation. This is the stage where we build the units with the educators, we design the daily resources, rubrics, reflections, assessments, etc., and check in with educators while teaching the unit. After the unit has been taught, we review the student evidence with the key leadership stakeholders and discuss whether or not this is evidence of the mission-informed portrait of global citizens that they set out to develop. If so, we move forward with our implementation plan, and if not, we utilize this data to adapt and personalize our implementation further to meet the contexts of the school. From here we work with schools on 3-5+ year partnerships to ensure that this work becomes self-directed and can be sustained internally within their approaches to teaching and learning.
Best practice research on whole school transformation, and our early years focusing on curriculum design, all state that implementation success depends on personalized, long-term, structures and systems, while also building internal capacity.
We help educators to level up their existing practice to be more centered on embedding global citizenship, sustainability, DEI, service and community engagement, well-being, harmony with nature, and other themes that lead to the health of people and the planet.
We do this through curriculum design workshops, conferences, webinars, coaching, and work with schools that center on our Empathy to Impact Approach. This approach involves identifying an issue that the students, school, or community members care deeply about. We then embed opportunities to develop authentic awareness and investigate while frontloading necessary skills workshops to support content learning goals. We then ensure that students are able to develop the knowledge, skills, and understandings or content goals necessary for success in that area of study. This approach can be done in an extra-curricular or co-curricular setting, but we want to encourage embedding into content as much as possible to ensure that ‘learning’ and skill development is key in this process. Then we support teaching teams through community assets mapping, identifying community partners with similar goals, and we work on identifying a type of impactful action that is mutually beneficial but also serves as a form of transfer or a performance task for the identified content goals we’re assessing. Consistently throughout the process, we ensure that consistent and critical reflection is taking place and that evidence of impact and global competency is collected qualitatively.
This approach can be used with any grade level, subject area, or curricular structure, and even embeds nicely into existing UBD approaches to teaching and learning at a school. The key is leveling up existing structures and not replacing or adding them. See any of our vignettes to explore what this might look like in a variety of contexts.
Another way that we Inspire Educators is through our Global Citizenship Certificate (GCC) program and courses. Steve spent his lockdown during the pandemic compiling all the most powerful global citizenship tools and resources into a one-stop shop for educators. This program is a year-long program comprised of 19 individual modules and you can take the whole course program at once, or take any of the three individual 5-6 week courses. The course always invites a group of like-minded and passionate educators from around the globe offering opportunities for interaction between cohort members, coaching from Inspire Citizens Facilitators, and practical and applicable tasks to bring these resources back to your classroom or school practice immediately. You can see the course description and the following vignettes to learn more about our GCC program and its impact on educators.
Inspire Citizens members have always been ‘teachers first’ and we love offering face-to-face learning opportunities for students. We offer student leadership workshops, conferences, and events for students, we offer long-term student leadership support for student leadership programs at schools where we personalize skills programs for existing student leaders and help them to build self-sustaining leadership programs at their schools or with their community groups.
We share Inspiring Stories
The most important part of our work is that we SHARE PROOF OF CONCEPT. The only effective professional learning is the type that yields observable results in student competencies, outcomes, and attitudes. Any educator or consultant could tell you that their approaches are effective, but we, at Inspire Citizens, aspire to let the students and educators speak for us. We also share this evidence so that it provides ideas, inspiration, and hope that if others can do it, you can do it too!
And if we all do something similar to what’s in these vignettes, podcasts, or media pieces, we can have an immensely positive impact on the world.
- Vignettes (teacher experiences and student evidence)
- Podcasts (student voice)
- Student Media and Digital Advocacy
We also provide Inspired Experiences where we offer global citizenship-focused experiential learning programs for schools as service providers, or we can work with the school and the experiential learning service provider to match the school’s vision for service, global citizenship, or curricular integration and collaboratively design a program.
We offer Inspired Coaching services, where educators, school leaders, or coordinators can work individually or in small teams with Inspire Citizens facilitators to level up their practice, build programs, or support implementation personalized to their context.
Because we believe in having global citizenship education equitably accessible to as many people as possible, we recently started the Inspire Citizens Foundation. With this non-profit, we hope to find sources of funding, CSR initiatives, grants, and donations so that we can offer free professional development events and student empowerment events to schools or educators without access to funds, around the world. Find out more at the link above and feel free to connect us with any interested partners or donors.
We have created many free resources to share with the world. We have unit planning tools and resources for educators, our student-facing ,‘ready to use’ Changemaker Action Plan, our Global Impact Schools Self Study which acts as an evidence collection system and model for schools approaching whole global citizenship, free webinars, and our mailer.
I would also like to highlight our Self-Discovery Tool, co-created with Greg Curtis. Inspired by our global impact schools self-study, CIS global citizenship accreditation, WASC accreditation, and best practice resources for sustainability and service learning. It is a discovery tool or self-assessment for school leaders to explore their schoolwide approaches to global citizenship. It produces a graphic, and a report, and can be used multiple times to track a school’s progress and growth. It is an open-source tool that we aspire to get into the hands of as many school leaders as possible, so please try it out and feel free to share.
If you’d prefer to see us live, we present at international conferences, and regional workshops, and host or speak at virtual events.
What’s Next for You and Inspire Citizens
What’s next for us is to continue to find partner schools and build deep and sustainable systems to develop global citizens. We want to help schools strengthen and sustain reciprocal and mutually beneficial partnerships. We will continue to empower educators, students, and school stakeholders. We endeavor to support and provide more equitable access to our services through non-profit and philanthropic endeavors. We are currently developing our online courses to allow ease of access to more educators around the globe. And finally, we hope to aspire to increase our visibility through books, publications, podcasts, stories, and our sharing of free resources.
Please inquire into our Global Citizenship Certificate courses and programs and feel free to reach out if you have any questions about how this might support you as an educator, or may support professional learning communities of educators at your institution. Our next educator cohort begins on September 21, 2024.
What final message would you like to share with our audience?
We will CONTINUE TO PLAY OUR EMPATHY TO IMPACT “album” straight to as many hearts as possible and do our part in influencing positive communal interactions and creating momentum to contribute to a more harmonious present and future
Don’t shy away from local and global challenges. We all play a role, every action has an influence, and together, we are exactly what is needed for widespread impact. We just need the right tools and approaches. And if we can slightly optimize existing systems for more empathy and more impact, think about how many millions of people could be impacted.
Aaron Moniz Contact Information
Website: https://inspirecitizens.org
X (Twitter) @inspirecitizen2
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/inspirecitizens
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaron-moniz-61b1381b5/
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I hope you enjoyed the conversation with Aaron Moniz and me on my virtual porch. Aaron’s journey of being in multiple Punk Rock bands and how he and Steve started Inspire Citizens will blow you away. I know you will love it. I hope you, my listeners, enjoyed the podcast and checked out Aaron’s amazing journey on this post. Please share this podcast and the post with your friends.
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| Make sure you check out more of the Rethinking Learning podcasts and each post that the guests created. Click on this link or the logo below to list by episode, alphabetical, or reflections.
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I am a co-host of a new podcast “Real Talk with Barbara and Nicole.” Check out the episodes about Authenticity in a Polarized Society around different topics. Click on RealTalkBN or the logo below.
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| I’m getting wonderful feedback on how much the information and stories in “Define Your Why” has helped them. For more information about this book, go to this page or click on the book for resources, questions, and links. | My new book, “Grow Your Why…One Story at a Time” includes 23 stories from inspirational educators, innovators, and entrepreneurs. Go to this page or click on the book to go to Why Press Publishing for launching, details, and resources.
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