ACE Community Spotlight: Dustin Rimmey 🎉 🤩 ❤️

ACE Community Spotlight ✨ 
 

A new (monthly!) space to celebrate the educators, stories, and creativity happening across our community. 

We talk a lot in this community about how YOU are the reason it feels the way it feels, a place where every voice and every story matters. So starting this month, we wanted to create a space to actually pause and point at that. Each month, we're going to spotlight a member of our community: something they made, something they wrote, something they tried in their classroom, or just a moment that captures what being part of the Adobe Creative Educator Community feels like for them.

Meet Dustin Rimmey 🎉 

Dustin teaches US History and World History, and if you've ever come across his blog, teacher's plAIground, or caught one of his sessions at ISTE, TCEA, or AMLE, you know he thinks (and writes) a lot about creativity, thinking routines, and what it actually looks like to build a classroom where students feel like their story matters.

Your Story Matters 

This summer, Dustin came home from the Adobe Education Summit with three words he couldn't shake: Your Story Matters. ❤️

The theme showed up everywhere, but Dustin said it really landed during the morning Ignite Talks — three-minute shares from ACE Innovators, student ambassadors, and higher education faculty. The ones that stuck with him most were from students talking about what happens when creativity stops being a reward or a break from "real" learning and becomes the way they learn; how they started seeing themselves differently once they had something worth saying and the tools to say it. For Dustin, that turned Your Story Matters into something bigger than a theme, it became a philosophy he's carrying straight into his own classroom this year. 

Dusin shared about his train ride experience and how he had lots of ideas turning over in his mind as the wheels turned over on a very long train ride home. He wrote a full reflection called "Your Story Matters: A Reflection on the Adobe Education Summit." We're not going to summarize the whole thing here but it's worth the full read in his own words, but there's one part we can't stop thinking about. 

Dustin wrote about what it felt like joining this community as an ACE Leader and then finding out he'd been named an ACE Innovator, and how, from strangers, no less, the response was nothing but warmth. He described it as a place that makes you feel like the weird one finally found the right room. 

That's it. That's the whole thing we're trying to build here, a community that we are creating Adobe with you. 🫶 

He also wrote about Your Story Matters becoming the mantra he's carrying into his own classroom this year.  Not as a slogan, but as a real shift in how he's asking students to show up in his US History and World History classes. If you teach anything where students are asked to find themselves in the material, build confidence, and share their voice, his reflection on that is worth your time. 

A Fun Little Aside 

Somewhere in the middle of all that reflection, Dustin also had a lot of fun with a photowalk challenge around Adobe HQ that he shared examples of the bingo card, cool captures with his Polaroid camera, the Upside Down room, all of it! Creativity showing up in the small moments too, exactly the way we love to see it. 📸 

And because apparently one reflection wasn't enough processing for one summer, he even wrote a follow-up post about the (very long, very intentional) train ride home. This is a good reminder that sometimes the best thinking happens after we slow down, take time for ourselves and those we love. 

Your Turn 💬 

This spotlight only works if it keeps going, and that means we need YOU. 

Did something click for you recently? Did you try something new in your classroom with Adobe Express, Student Spaces, walk away from a session with a new mantra, connect with someone that inspired you, or make something you're proud of? 

Add it to the comments below, write your own post, and link your social posts and stories celebrating what you and your learning community are learning, creating, and sharing. We’d love to shine the light on YOU as we pick from these to spotlight right here next month, and the month after that, and the month after that. 🎉 

This is your community. Let's keep celebrating each other's stories! ❤️🎉💯 

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