I am on the fringes of a course on “Integrating Sustainability Competences in the Curriculum” that my awesome colleague Steven Curtis is currently teaching. And the way he introduces the course — in an audio file, where he (with seagulls screaming in the background) tells the story of us meeting on a dock, ready to board a ship to start this journey of discovery together, where he will be the navigator, but we’ll need everybody’s skills and contributions to make it safely to our destination — was so cool and impressive, that I (obviously!) had to read up a bit on storytelling in higher education for sustainability! Here is my compilation of two books on the matter (that I, admittedly, mostly browsed).

Storytelling is used for many different purpose — pure entertainment as well as science communication, advertising, health communication, PR, and many more. In higher education, they can be a teaching-learning format (for example watching the movie “day after tomorrow” or reading Dürrenmatt’s “Die Physiker”), a method for gaining knowledge (so asking someone to tell a story to us, or using existing stories, as an intervention or in order to try to understand how someone thinks), and as science communication (for example how we have used it for assessment).

Stories can be told in the literal way, but also through many different media, as for example poems, videos, blogs, TikToks, Tweets (or however they are called these days). In all those formats, a story has a chronology and usually a distinct beginning, middle, and end. There is a plot that typically follows one or more persons* (in the widest sense, can also be for example animals or robots. Or water parcels in this example from our own teaching!). There are typical ways stories are told (for example a hero’s journey or a fairy tale) and the mood for a story is clearly set as, for example, entertaining or concerned, dramatic or hopeful. Stories condense knowledge and practical experience, communicate world views, discuss problems and solutions. They combine conveying factual information with sharing and eliciting emotions. Stories can be immersive and even interactive. And they should be written with the “kitchen call” in mind: every story should contain something that you want to tell someone else immediately, and that is simple enough that you could shout it from the living room to the kitchen to do so.

In sustainability communication, stories are usually normative (as in they assume and teach that keeping the planet liveable for future generations is a good idea) and at the same time build on reflexivity and emancipation.

Stories stay with us for much longer than information presented in most other forms (one study showed that when memorising a list of words vs the list of words embedded in a story they created, the latter was 6-7 times more successful for retrieval! And in general, studies seem to show positive effects on memory (especially of details) as well as attitudes and intentions. But from what I see in the two books, different studies can have very different results, so it is not as easy as just saying that “storytelling works” (surprise!), but it is a bit more complicated than that. Stories communicating sustainability topics should be authentic and experiential, and therefore also plausible and realistic, as well as thought-provoking. One excellent example of storytelling that came to my mind when reading about storytelling is Kim Nicholas’ book “Under the sky we make”. Big recommendation to read it!

But there are of course also problems associated with storytelling, for example that the message necessarily is oversimplified, and also that using a frame unreflectedly can support one goal while accidentally undermining another (e.g. comedy that plays on gender stereotypes — but why would anyone still use that in this day and age anyway?). Also, the empowerment towards reflexivity and emancipation does not happen by itself without carefully building it into the story. And, especially with science communication getting more and more competitive around potential consumers’ time and engagement, maybe it is easy to go overboard and focus only on entertainment value and not on the actual content any more. And another thing I noticed on myself: When I think I’m about to read a scientific book, I hate it when there are stories that are longer than a vignette. Just get to the point already!! That is not a reaction I have to stories generally, just when my expectations don’t match what I am getting. So clearly, storytelling needs to be framed well so people are in the right mindset to even listen.

But how to tell good sustainability stories? There is a cool online learning unit available on “Storytelling for Sustainability” (developed as part of the project that led to the Fisher et al. (2022) book, and a fair summary of the book!). It takes about 45 minutes to do the online learning unit (and of course you cannot expect to come out an expert as if you spent more time on it or read the actual book, or, you know, study journalism), but it is a great start!

* Somewhere, one of the authors was very clear in their advice: “do not make yourself the star” if you want your message to have an effect. You can of course be part of the story, but focus on other people who were part of the process, lessons learnt, and the audience! A related recommendation by some other author is to share “a story of self” that describes how we ourselves came to be active on the matter and what challenges we faced and overcame, “a story of now” that describes the problem, and “a story of us” that is about how we share values and are community (This should maybe not be surprising, but if you want engage audiences that you aren’t familiar with already, you should really spend some time figuring out how they think and speak, and adapt your message accordingly. They use the example of centre-right audiences and energy efficiency in households and that terms like “balance”, “responsibility”, common sense”, “avoiding waste” work well)

Fischer, D., Fücker, S., Selm, H., & Sundermann, A. (Eds.). (2022). Narrating sustainability through storytelling. Taylor & Francis.

Molthan-Hill, P., Luna, H., Wall, T., Puntha, H., & Baden, D. (Eds.). (2020). Storytelling for sustainability in higher education: an educator’s handbook. Routledge.