Title: Lived experience of climate change - a digital storytelling approach

Authors: Daniel Otto

Addresses: Department of Political Science, International Politics, Interdisciplinary Distance Studies of Environmental Sciences FernUniversität in Hagen, Universitätsstr. 33, D-58084 Hagen, Germany

Abstract: While the term 'climate change' is firmly anchored in the global discourse, its visibility is often vague and subliminal. Education's key task, therefore, is not only to provide knowledge on causes and impacts, but also to build a nexus between scientific knowledge and what is called 'lived experience of climate change' in this article. Over the course of a two-year international publicly funded project, the use of digital storytelling was tested as a method to teach students in higher education in innovative ways. Starting from a natural science point of view, interdisciplinary groups of students produced a digital story in the form of a 3-5 minutes video presenting the effects of climate change in their home countries. Our evaluation shows that digital storytelling as a teaching method did not only enhance our students' knowledge, but also visualises how vastly different the effects of climate change are perceived.

Keywords: digital storytelling; climate change; interdisciplinary; e-learning; lived experience; higher education; blended-learning; sustainable development; virtual learning; constructivism.

DOI: 10.1504/IJGW.2017.084784

International Journal of Global Warming, 2017 Vol.12 No.3/4, pp.331 - 346

Received: 24 Jun 2015
Accepted: 20 Oct 2015
Published online: 29 Jun 2017 *

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