Leveraging the power of story and narrative, the SSE team is able to convey difficult sustainability topics in a more approachable way (Archambault & Warren, 2014; Shelton, Archambault, & Warren, 2016). The videos within our courses incorporate elements of digital storytelling in order to present diverse perspectives, an essential component when confronting the complex sustainability topics of our time. Our digital stories fuse together the use of recorded narration, video, illustrations, and audio/visual effects to produce a documentary-style digital narrative. These stories take into consideration the global and local issues of sustainability in 10-minute segments that span a total of approximately 60 minutes per topic, and cover information on sustainability issues such as population, food, water, poverty, and fossil fuels.
To produce our content, we work in a collaborative fashion with an interdisciplinary team consisting of content specialists in sustainability including subject matter expert faculty, Ph.D. students, pedagogy faculty with a background in education, a group of reviewers, a designer/video editor, and a multimedia team. In the age of multimedia, hybrid, and flipped classrooms, we have worked to create meaningful and impactful digital stories for newly developed courses focused on the topic of sustainability. To find out more about our design process, please check out our videos below.
In addition to digital storytelling production, we have also led workshops with international education audiences on how to produce and integrate video content into curriculum, beyond the topic of sustainability. Digital storytelling is an accessible, exciting, and engaging way to communicate information for all educators, no matter their focus or specialty. By sharing our best practices with other educators who are passionate about engaging curriculum, we hope to contribute to the continued development of 21st century higher education.