The Power of Storytelling

We believe that stories can be powerful tools for educational and training purposes, as they can help us think around significant issues, where human cognition and emotions intersect. 

Stories and storytelling as a method can support engagement with difficult and complex themes while providing a narrative structure (Bleakley, 2005; Cunsolo Willox et al., 2013). This helps learners retain important information and increases their motivation to learn and understand key points because stories can make abstract concepts more tangible and more relatable. They also help us adopt diverse, and often conflicting, perspectives in the way one can tell or read into a story, which can promote empathy, and understanding alternative viewpoints (Wallin et al., 2019). 

Another reason why stories are important is that they offer the opportunity for contextualisation. As with all technologies and innovations, the context within which these are conceived, designed, developed and used is of paramount importance. Stories provide this structure, by sketching out fictitious, plausible and less plausible scenarios, where the learner can appreciate the relevance of RRI concepts, why and how they can be applied, as well as the implications of not doing so. 

Our method draws from the narrative theory of education. Narrative-based learning is a learning approach that suggests that people make sense of their experiences through stories, and storytelling (Mawasi et al., 2022). Such narratives function as a mental framework and as the communication vehicle for people to interpret and understand the world around them, including their own experience of the world. This is made possible because storytelling, and stories more generally, help contextualise abstract ideas and concepts, in a way that the latter can be then communicated to others. In other words, storytelling provides a structure for knowledge-transfer between the sender and the receiver (Ipe, 2007).

We also draw from processual storytelling, where stories are generated and co-created with learners (Roberts et al., 2022). Here, we approach researchers as a community with experience, whereby this experience can be shared with others through storytelling and where such sharing can be activated via prompting. Considering also the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI), such sharing, prompting and restorying can be particularly beneficial as it directly supports continuous reflection around complex and often sensitive topics that relate to responsibility and RRI.

Additionally, we draw from the discourse on the implications of portrayals and perceptions of AI  (Cave et al., 2018) where AI is often associated with extreme utopic and dystopic narratives (Carroll et al., 2024). As people are ‘storytelling creatures’, stories can have a major impact on them because they create meaning and coherence, which is very needed in a changing society. These stories capture our attention and engage our emotions, and thus both seduce us and mislead us (Brooks, 2022). Therefore, when using stories as an educational tool, we need to introduce mechanisms that help us critically analyse these stories and methods to develop new narratives that are more accurate and better serve a social purpose.

Along these lines, through the method we propose for teaching, learning and training on RRI, we wish to engage in a conversation with others around the different narratives of and about AI, how these influence the public’s understanding in terms of the technology’s implications, and examine whether and how storytelling, instead of focusing on extremely positive or extremely negative narratives, can instead provide a platform for engaging in a critical thinking process. At the core of this, is the element of learning through narration.