Festival of Learning 2018

Note: This is a 3-hour session - the first half (90 min) is before lunch, and the second half (90 min) is after lunch.

Educational institutions lend themselves to siloed ways of seeing reality. Teams that lack common view and values often fail by producing results that are inappropriate and ineffective, despite the hard work, talents, and investment of all involved.

In this session, we will explore collective storytelling as a means of cultivating shared understanding, surfacing shared values, and enabling collective action. We argue that such coming together is prerequisite to effective, appropriate, and ethical design and pedagogy. By inviting us to imagine people and the worlds they inhabit in rich and detailed ways, we believe that stories can support us to think in careful and caring ways. The session will start with a brief presentation about our experiences using stories to guide our work around open educational practices at the University of Alberta. We will share our experiences using stories in a group, composed of diverse stakeholders across campus, to achieve a high degree of cohesion and shared vision. During this hands-on workshop, participants will be given a design challenge related to open-educational practices and care. Through a series of facilitated storytelling activities, teams will develop a design proposal for presentation and discussion with the larger group. In a debriefing phase, participants will reflect on the potential applications of storytelling in collaborative professional contexts.