To be a storyteller is an incredible position from which to influence hearts and minds, and each one of us has the capacity to utilise storytelling for a sustainable future. This book offers unique and powerful insights into how stories and storytelling can be utilised within higher education to support sustainability literacy. Stories can shape our perspective of the world around us and how we interact with it, and this is where storytelling becomes a useful tool for facilitating understanding of sustainability concepts which tend to be complex and multifaceted.
The craft of storytelling is as old as time and has influenced human experience throughout the ages. The conscious use of storytelling in higher education is likewise not new, although less prevalent in certain academic disciplines; what this book offers is the opportunity to delve into the concept of storytelling as an educational tool regardless of and beyond the boundaries of subject area.
Written by academics and storytellers, the book is based on the authors' own experiences of using stories within teaching, from a story of "the Ecology of Law" to the exploration of sustainability in accounting and finance via contemporary cinema. Practical advice in each chapter ensures that ideas may be put into practice with ease.
In addition to examples from the classroom, the book also explores wider uses of storytelling for communication and sense-making and ways of assessing student storytelling work. It also offers fascinating research insights, for example in addressing the question of whether positive utopian stories relating to climate change will have a stronger impact on changing the behaviour of readers than will dystopian stories.
Everyone working as an educator should fi nd some inspiration here for their own practice; on using storytelling and stories to co-design positive futures together with our students.
Petra Molthan-Hill leads the Green Academy at Nottingham Trent University (UK), supporting all faculties to integrate Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), a subject on which she has published widely. She is co-designing the UN's Principles of Responsible Management Education (PRME) Carbon Literacy Training for Business Schools, following her related research in the television industry.
Heather Luna was a lecturer for the Green Academy at Nottingham Trent University. Between 2005 and 2012, she was the Education for Sustainable Development project coordinator for the UK's Higher Education Academy. She co-edited the Routledge book, The Sustainable University .
Tony Wall is the founder and head of the International Centre for Thriving, a global-scale collaboration among business, arts, health and education to deliver sustainable transformation. He is an Advance-HE National Teaching Fellowship and holds three Santander International Research Excellence Awards.
Helen Puntha is a learning and teaching adviser and Green Academy deputy at Nottingham Trent University. She co-founded the Scholarship Projects for Undergraduate Researchers (SPUR) scheme, co-designed the innovative Sustainability in Practice online certificate and is currently working on the Guardian award-winning SCALE-UP active learning project.
Denise Baden researches and teaches sustainable business and business ethics at Southampton Business School, University of Southampton. She leads the Green Stories writing competitions which aim to solicit positive visions of what a sustainable society might look like, see www.greenstories.org.uk.
