Digital Storytelling as a Pedagogical Tool for Global Sustainability

Abstract

Recent developments from the natural sciences have provided extremely relevant approaches to conceive and address global sustainability. Among those developments, the Planetary Boundaries (PBs) concept (Rockström et al, 2009; Steffen et al, 2015) has brought an urge to understand and address the biophysical limits of the planet, issues on the complex links between the economy, society and the environment, on time and place scales, on complex governance, and on environmental values. In this instructional innovation paper, we argue that sustainability in management education (SiME) needs to address those tenets, through hands-on approaches that foster deep learning and transform knowledge, skills and emotions. Here we explore the value of digital storytelling (the merger between traditional storytelling and multimedia technology) for that quest. Based on our three-year experience across three continents (in the cities of Perth, Singapore, Dubai and Munich, where we involved almost three hundred students), we offer a detailed instructional practice to foster learning on the PBs, and we elaborate on the deep learning “mechanisms” behind it. In so doing, our paper introduces a pedagogical (experiential) approach to the PBs in business schools, and advances the use of digital storytelling for SiME.