#83 Audience Changes Everything: Rushton Hurley on Storytelling and the Power of the Showcase

In this episode of Make It Mindful, Seth talks with Rushton Hurley — founder of Next Vista for Learning and Director of Innovation at Junipero Serra High School — about the annual showcase that brings student projects from Serra in California together with student projects from Parklands College in Cape Town. Rushton's claim, sharpened over years of running the Creative Solutions for the Global Good class: students aim for "good" when they know other people will see their work, and "good enough" when only the teacher will. The episode works through what changes — in design, in motivation, in resource requirements — when the audience expands.

Together, Seth and Rushton explore the design of the Creative Solutions for the Global Good class, the Serra–Parklands College partnership, the iterative storytelling model that replaces the year-end capstone, AI as a tough-questions generator (not a writing tool), and the minimum viable conditions for replicating this kind of work at less-resourced schools. The episode closes with a project from a Parklands student who redesigned the desiccant sachets used in pharmaceutical packaging — the original ones can leak when saturated, and her version changes color when it crosses the threshold.

Key topics

• Audience as motivator: "good" vs. "good enough"
• Iterative storytelling as pedagogy, not summative assessment
• The Serra–Parklands College partnership across continents
• AI as a tough-questions generator
• Minimum viable conditions for project-based learning at any school
• Concrete student projects: Scale Bridge, Fruit Share, the desiccant sachet

Links & Resources

• Next Vista for Learning — https://www.nextvista.org
• Rotary.cool — http://rotary.cool (Rushton's Rotary club, the connector to many of the showcase's global audience members)
• Junipero Serra High School — https://www.serrahs.com 
• Parklands College, Cape Town — https://www.parklands.co.za/
• Kevin Brookhouser, The 20 Time Project — https://www.20time.org/
• More or Less (BBC) — Rushton's recommendation - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qshd
• Rushton's previous appearance on Make It Mindful: "Education Futurist: Rushton Hurley" — https://makeitmindful.transistor.fm/episodes/40-education-furturist-rushton-hurley
• To request access to the recorded showcase: email rhurley@serrahs.com

Guest Bio: Rushton Hurley

Rushton Hurley is the founder of Next Vista for Learning, a nonprofit video library and student video contest platform he started in 2005, and the Director of Innovation at Junipero Serra High School in San Mateo, California. His work centers on giving students agency over project-based work, building partnerships between schools across continents, and treating storytelling — the act of telling and retelling a project's story to different audiences — as the primary mechanism through which students improve. He previously taught as an assistant language teacher in Japan.

About the Host: Seth Fleischauer is the founder of Banyan Global Learning and host of Make It Mindful: Insights for Global Learning. Through Banyan, he designs live virtual programs that connect K-12 classrooms to global peers and expert facilitators — building the kind of structured, human-centered learning the podcast explores. See https://banyangloballearning.com/