Using Polyphonic Storytelling Techniques for Skills Development

Abstract

For a long time, the hero’s journey has served as a popular storytelling template for designing learning experiences, even more so with the rise of technology and its increased focus on character design, magic moments, and surprise elements. This paper suggests that it is about time learning experience designers looked more at what is going on at the periphery of stories. Lifting everyone’s — including AI’s — voice and engaging them in the co-creation of constructive alternative narratives can help learners to develop future skills, better understand complex problems, and drive behavioral change. To support this hypothesis, this paper showcases a series of pilot workshops on climate change that were conducted in the context of a global environmental initiative in the time period between November 2022 and February 2023. The workshops explored how polyphonic storytelling, community building, and artistic impulses ranging from classical to contemporary and indigenous poetry, sketches, multi-media collage, and video input pushes cross-disciplinary, cross-hierarchical, and cross-cultural groups of learners to use and develop their critical and connected thinking skills, their imagination, language skills, listening skills, empathy, and collaborative team skills to build environmental awareness and come up with a more constructive narrative about climate change. Qualitative data analysis indicates that learning experience design that moves away from the traditional concept of the hero’s journey towards co-creating polyphonic narratives can enable learners to leave current mental models and explore new pathways of thinking and doing.