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N1

Conference: Sustainability – Learning through Narratives

The major changes facing humanity, both ecologically and socially, are not being told correctly and adequately in terms of their significance in the media, education and culture. How this can be achieved in the form of new narratives was the topic of the conference “N1: Nachhaltig(keit) – Lernen durch Erzählungen” (N1: Sustainability – Learning through Narratives), which took place on Friday 8 December 2017 at the DEKRA University of Media in Berlin.

https://lernen-durch-erzaehlungen.org/

Resumé of the N1 Conference “Sustainability – Learning through Narratives” with a view to strategic steps and fields of work

Berlin, 8 December 2017

With the Sustainable Action Plan on ESD (NAP), the broad topic of “narration and narratives” for learning sustainable development has come into the public eye. That there is an urgent need both in education and in communication (understood as a social learning process) is shown by the corresponding events of the last months: the Schwanenwerder conference “Great Transformation and the Media”, the K3 conference in Salzburg, the workshop “Image and Narrative” during the NAP agenda congress, the conference in Darmstadt on “Narratives of Sustainability” (January 2018) and the International Summer Universities “Transmedial Storytelling (January and August 2018)

With “N1: Nachhaltig(keit) – Lernen durch Erzählungen” (N1: Sustainability – Learning through Narratives), the conference series “Narratives and Narrative Forms in ESD” started on 8 December 2017. Until 2020, the Kolleg für Management und Gestaltung nachhaltiger Entwicklung (KMGNE) in cooperation with the partner networks media, cultural education and other partners will focus on the opportunities of narratives in education for sustainable development. The KMGNE and the partner network media are thus fulfilling the corresponding commitment in the goals of the National Action Plan on Education for Sustainable Development of September 2017.

“It will be one day”… how we learn for the future with narratives was the headline of the press release for the N1 conference, which saw itself as a rehearsal space for discourse on narratives and narratives for the “great transformation” of sustainable development.

The conference was conceived like a feature newspaper: The keynote speeches were intended to provide key words for self-reflection, to define the framework of tension of the topic and to help change perspectives. It was not primarily about imparting knowledge – it was about opening up approaches and “raising” expectations about the topic. The 85 participants from academia and practice came for the purpose of arriving at their own new ideas through these approaches and rubbing them together in the discourse of the workshops. Not always, but on the whole it was successful.

The range of keynotes went from the question of why and the depth of narratives, the tension between narratives and narratives and an aesthetic demand on them – to content-related approaches for future narratives (such as planetary guard rails and expanded welfare index), suitable media, formats and narrative structures, to exercises based on good examples and forms of narrative. (see programme)

The range of discourses and their results can be summarised in the following strategic tasks or challenges for the further work in the networks and for N+ – whereby the detailed evaluation will be available in February. So for now it is a reflection and a rough self-understanding.

As in the workshop on “Image and Narrative” during the AGENDA Congress, the conference hinted at the mental and creative difficulties that even “those well versed in climate knowledge and knowledge of sustainable development” have in creating narratives for the transformation of sustainable development. Either the present, with all its frugality with regard to change, is merely perpetuated or the critique of unsustainable situations remains dystopian or (dis)disturbances are melancholically aestheticised.

Behind this are pedagogical-didactic challenges that are closely linked to cultural and political education, as well as challenges to sustainability and transformation studies to provide core narratives that ground the life content of future possibilities:

A. Narratives as part of ESD

  • The terms narratives and narratives in transformation and sustainability communication and education are to be used in a decidedly cautious and well-justified manner.
  • Storytelling in ESD is not a marketing tool
  • Didactic exploration of narratives for ESD / learning in transformations (including the study of how narratives work)
  • Opening up audiovisual and interactive forms of narratives (digital, informal learning)
  • Decidedly opening up narratives from art and media for learning in transformation
  • Conceptual networking of new learning cultures in transformation processes with new learning cultures through digitalisation – through interactive reception and production of narratives

B. Narratives for/ about “major transformations

  • Development of basic content and narrative structures for possible narratives (depth of narrative (world view), long-term responsibility, future-derived narrative (experiences from the future) )
  • Investigation of target/milieu group-specific narrative forms
  • Development/design of aesthetic “gestalts” and gestalts of transformation
  • Investigation of changes in social communication through digitalisation

C. Narratives in social communication

  • Design of narrative forms of science communication
  • Changes in journalism (e.g. constructive journalism)