Connecting young people through improvised collaborative storytelling for sustainable futures
Dr Perpetua Kirby and colleagues from the Schools of Media, Arts and Humanities, Engineering and Informatics, and Education and Social Work have received SSRP funding to scale up their sustainability research by developing bids for bigger platform grants.
Project description
This project builds on established MAH/ESW alliances, integrating SHL/SEI, exploring the role of Creative Writing, Speculative Fiction, Serious Game Playing and Uncertain Pedagogies, to educate young people in environmental sustainability facing the prognosis of planetary degradation. It attends to ‘sustainability’, ‘human flourishing’ and ‘digital futures’ in line with the UoS strategy.
The project will prototype a multi-community game that offers:
- A storytelling activity adaptable for use with diverse groups globally that stimulates imaginative and cooperative problem solving. It engages young people with an indebtedness to those who came before and the as-yet-unborn, surfacing buried historical/cultural contexts (indigeneity, cosmovisions, neo/colonial), and the emotional/existential.
- Multi-community peer interaction, enabling young people to respond to the resonances/dissonances surfaced in stories (e.g. assumptions, desires, values, etc) as co-pedagogues.
- Knowledge created reciprocally of diverse global youth sustainability imaginaries, forged in relation to contemporary and historical/cultural inheritances.
The game invites secondary school-aged young people to model a sustainable future focused on a particular setting (e.g. mini-island; spaceship; neighbourhood), together with a trained local educator. The development phase will co-construct the story framing with global partners to ensure it meaningfully engages diverse groups. The game involves multiple sessions, beginning by exploring young people’s inheritances (informed by local expertise), followed by improvised storytelling together with regular input across groups to input further information/scenarios and to compel group choices. The research methodology involves researcher-pedagogues in each locale undertaking participant observation and interviews, and analysis of the narrated stories and created artefacts produced as part of the game.
Social and cultural outcomes and impact
The game’s distinctiveness is that it fosters global youth collaboration offering transformative potential. Outputs resource educators to support students to make change through engaging with local and global considerations. The project integrates research on the educational necessity to engage with legacies (Sutoris, 2023); simulations for transformative potential (Rumore et al., 2016); roleplay to shift positions (Bowman & Lieberoth, 2018); personally relevant active pedagogies (Monroe et al, 2019), and deliberative encounters (Webb & Kirby, 2019). The project will result in a touring exhibition and deliberative events to raise awareness to harness support for creative educational pedagogies and wider action on sustainability.
Academic outcomes and impact
These impacts may include, but are not limited to, contributing to the understanding and development of policy issues, and/or capacity building in relation to specific developmental challenges. Expanded knowledge from the in-depth study of 100-150 young people will include 2+ journal papers on:
- How sustainability experiences and imaginaries relate to young people’s cultural sensibilities and multiple inheritances.
- Educational value of gaming and collaboration to engage with global sustainable uncertainties.
There is a lack of a comprehensive policy integration of education globally (e.g. IPPC AR6 reports), despite the interconnectedness of SDGs 4 (education) and 13 (climate action). A policy briefing will promote the greater inclusion of education, advocating for transformative possibilities extending beyond students learning narrow curricula and socialised into existing ways of knowing/doing (IPR, 2023).
- Sustainable Development Goals
This project examines the following SDGs:
SDG 2 - Zero Hunger
SDG 4 - Quality Education
SDG 5 - Gender Equality
SDG 7 - Affordable and Clean Energy
SDG 10 - Reduced Inequalities
SDG 11 - Sustainable Communities and Cities
SDG 12 - Responsible Consumption and Production
SDG 13 - Climate Action
SDG 15 - Life on Land
Find out more about the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
- The team
Principal Investigator
- Dr Perpetua Kirby, School of Education and Social Work
Co-investigators
- Dr Sam Ladkin, School of Media, Arts and Humanities
- Professor Kate Howland, School of Informatics and Engineering
- Dr Joseph Walton, School of Media, Arts and Humanities
- Dr Rebecca Webb, School of Education and Social Work
Project partners
- Dr Aleksander Michelson, Praxix
- Katie Eberstein, Our City Our World
- Maurice Ssebisubi, Uganda Youth for the Environment
- Dr Citlalli Morelos Juarez, Tesoror Escondido Reserve, Ecuador
- Dr Anindita Saha, Consultant researcher – contact with multiple schools, West Bengal, India
-
Arne Tarara, Green Coding Solutions
Timeline
Start date: August 2024
End date: March 2025