Fostering sustainability competences through co-creation of digital storytelling: Effects of COVID-19 on higher education students’ reflective learning

Abstract

During COVID-19, online collaboration became more accessible than before, enabling higher education students and teachers to organize virtual mobility experiments and run projects with stakeholders across cultures. In this paper, we focus on three blended intensive programs, two in Finland and one in Hungary, to explore how the pedagogical approach of project-based digital storytelling combined with reflective writing contributed to students’ sustainability competence development during the pandemic and after. In these programs, multicultural teams of students worked on real-life digital storytelling projects aimed at driving sustainable changes in people’s thinking, behaviour, and lifestyles. Digital storytelling has proved effective in fostering students’ 21st century skills through engagement and co-creation with the wider world. Based on qualitative content analysis of 67 semi-structured learning journals, we explore students' developments in values-thinking, collaborative, and self-awareness competences during their digital storytelling projects. With insights from student reflections on their virtual, online, and blended learning, we discuss challenges and successes of project-based, collaborative, and reflective learning and propose best practices for using collaborative digital storytelling as a transformative method to foster sustainability competences across cultures.