Towards a Gamechangers's Attitude: Boosting Confidence in Storytelling by Awareness Raising

Practice Paper Recommended citation: Ettema, J., van Duren, I., & Lemmens, R. (2025). Towards a Gamechangers's Attitude: Boosting Confidence in Storytelling by Awareness Raising. In Kangaslampi, R., Langie, G., Järvinen, H.-M., & Nagy, B. (Eds.), SEFI 53rd Annual Conference. European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI), Tampere, Finland. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17631820. This Conference Paper is brought to you for open access by the 53rd Annual Conference of the European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI) at Tampere University in Tampere, Finland. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License. Towards a game-changers’ attitude: boosting confidence in storytelling by awareness raising J. Ettema1 University of Twente Enschede, the Netherlands https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8621-6624 I.C. van Duren University of Twente Enschede, the Netherlands https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9645-1380 Conference Key Areas: Engineering skills, professional skills, and transversal skills; engineer as social debater – new skills needed Keywords: Communication skills; awareness raising, Challenge-Based Learning, Storytelling; building confidence, practicing skills ABSTRACT As society is facing significant challenges, universities need to deliver gamechangers who play a crucial role in building sustainable solutions. Game-changers are empathetic, open-minded people that think out-of-the-box, can communicate, improvise, get people aligned, and collaborate to solve complex challenges. Scientific knowledge and empathy are not enough to generate societal change; students also need to become proficient in communication skills, while being provocative, inspirational, creative and self-aware. In this paper, we report on our experience in teaching essential communication skills to engage society into building joined solutions to improve sustainability. The elective course ‘Climate awareness raising’ is designed for, executed and evaluated with BSc, MSc and PhD students in engineering. The course uses a challenge-based learning approach. We focused on the skills storytelling and awareness raising. The students had an active role in determining their own learning process as interventions were flexible scheduled. The results show that by means of organising an actual awareness raising event on campus, students really mastered the concepts of awareness raising. They gained confidence in their storytelling skills by crafting simple, engaging stories and conveying their message to staff and students as well as insight in their project management skills as valuable side effect. This 1 J. Ettema [email protected] latter was an unforeseen side-effect that we treasure and will be further embedded in the future. 1 INTRODUCTION A major challenge for Higher Education Institutions is the responsibility to promote the employability prospects of their students. How to enable that their graduates are sees as people who will be successful at the job market and will make a difference for and in society? Industries, public organisations and other potential future employees demand much more than just knowledge and technical skills in a particular content field. The route to become an engineer is through the completion of a Master degree, and the development of a high level of skills. The program provides engineering students with technical and transversal skills needed to work and collaborate internationally. However, in an increasingly data-driven economy, the demand for soft social skills, like teamwork, communication and presentation, is increasing faster than the demand for technical skills (Börner et al., 2018). Fleming et al. (2024) who analysed over 26,000 job advertisements, found that communication skills and teamwork are particularly needed in a leadership role. So it is obvious that “making a difference” comes with strong communication skills to influence and inspire. There is a clear gap between what companies want and what graduates are capable of. As Hirudayaraj et al. (2021) showed in another study with nearly 500 companies that, although the level of newly hired engineers was good enough, that there was a substantial lack of communication skills. They found that this caveat was particularly the case for communicating in diverse as well as multidisciplinary groups. More and more, employees expect them to have a wide range of non-technical skills, like communicating effectively, work in teams, and to be adaptable to 21th century challenges (Martins et al., 2021). Addressing these 21st century skills in higher education is even more relevant in addressing the global challenges that society is facing, where constant, unpredictable and complex changes are now the norm in many industries (Martins et al., 2021). Educational approaches where students learn to work on real life challenges, such as Challenge-Based Learning (CBL), become common. The real-life aspect motivates students to cope with the unknowns of the future in which they will work, making learning more meaningful (Kamp, 2020). Real-life challenges provide an ideal opportunity to work with other disciplines and stakeholders (Clegg & Diller, 2019). However, in the academic curriculum, the emphasis is still predominantly on discipline-related communication skills and focussed on a single stakeholder. As societal challenges entail greater responsibility when solving them, we need a nextlevel attitude to actual participate in and contribute to the complex, multi-stakeholder challenges (Boldureanu et al., 2020; Cook, 2019). To prepare our students, our education needs to the support students to acquire that game-changing attitude (Cross & Congreve, 2021). Therefore, the curricula needs adjustment. We define a ‘game-changer’ as someone who has the courage and attitude to spark a multi-stakeholder dialogue where a new design space is created for exploring innovative solutions in this highly uncertain, complex, and chaotic world. Gamechangers are open-minded, strong in communication, knowledgeable, provocative, inspirational, creative, and self-aware. One of the essential communication skills we identified a game-changer should be trained in, is awareness raising. By practicing this skill, students become proficient in informing and educating various stakeholders with the intention of influencing society’s attitude, behaviour, and beliefs. By educating a variety of awareness raising techniques and strategies, students gain insight in the societal impact of awareness raising materials (Davis et al., 2018). In this paper we describe how we adopted a mild challenge-based learning pedagogy (Imanbayeva et al., 2023) to support students with essential communication skill awareness raising to build their self-confidence in storytelling. The attractive asset of CBL is that students are encouraged to actively co-work on acquiring new knowledge and skills in problem formulation, interdisciplinary collaboration, solving real global issues, and sustainability development for their future society (Rådberg et al., 2018). Essential for effective and impactful awareness raising is story telling as it fosters creativity, enhances their communication skills, and develops critical thinking skills. By crafting simple stories, students learn to (re- )organize their thoughts critically, and convey ideas clearly and effectively to a specific target audience (Zaitseva et al., 2024). To link-up with an actual Global Discussion and Global Development Goal we focus on fighting climate change challenges through climate awareness raising. 2 CONTEXT AND PRACTICAL WORK Our objective is to present an approach adopted to teach the communication skill ‘awareness raising’ in a course on combatting climate change. This paper is authored by the course coordinator, and the instructor responsible for the course as well as the competence interventions. The first author has vast experience in operationalising CBL approach in international classrooms addressing climate change challenges (Ettema et al., 2020), and the second author has evaluated how various teaching methods are perceived by a mixed group of cultures (van Duren and Groen, 2020). The results draw upon the authors’ direct experiences and observations complemented with student evaluations and interviews. 2.1 Participants The course has been run for two consecutive years. At the start and end students were asked to give their assessment on their awareness raising skills as well as their game-changer’s attitude in general. In addition, feedback on the course was received by the authors in writing as well as during plenary discussions throughout the course. We analysed students enrolled in the course for the academic years 2023-2024 and 2024-2025, at the University of Twente. In total 12 students joined the courses, ranging from BSc to PhD level. To assess how effective the course is on skill acquisition by students, the starting and end level were determined by the means of interviews, reflections and questionnaires. For the determining the starting level, we designed a Wooclap questionnaire, which allows anonymous entry. The questionnaire focused on student’s self-assessment using 3 or more Likert-type quantitative questions, complemented with open-ended questions. This questionnaire was integrated in the first lecture that introduced the course and streamline students’ and staff expectations on engagement and learning. To determine the end level, students replied to a questionnaire sent by email or were present in the evaluation sessions, of which the transcripts were made anonymous before the analyses. In addition, students wrote an accountability and reflection report on how they worked with concepts on awareness raising during creating the materials and organising the event. Besides, they reflected on the group work as well as their own contribution. 2.2 Course approach A mild CBL approach (Imanbayeva et al., 2023) is implemented as it constitutes an active learning pedagogy that provides students with a framework to acquire and develop key transversal disciplinary skills like problem solving, critical thinking, project leadership or communication. We adhere to Malmqvist et al.’s definition of challenge-based learning (2015) as the identification, analysis and design of a solution to a societal problem. Both years, the external stakeholder was World Wide Fund for Nature. WWF was selected as a partner and client for whom the students created a campaign. That context set the boundary conditions for the CBL engage phase. Students discussed and selected their own preferred real-world climate change issue for which they wanted to raise awareness. During the second CBL phase Investigate, “Learning by doing” is the active learning strategy, as implemented and advocated by many in higher education (e.g. Freeman et al., 2014). Inspired by that concept, we scheduled an actual event at our university’s campus for the third CBL phase Act. Students should actively present their created materials, while practicing the communication skill awareness raising. To streamline the preparation of this event, interactive feedback sessions and formative assignments were regularly organised to ensure students have plenty of opportunities to receive help and maintain confidence (e.g. Sternad, 2015). These group sessions and assignments during a course promote a focus on learning and error recovery rather than on performance and end grades. 3 RESULTS AND INSIGHTS Both years, students organised an actual event in our faculty, over lunch time to interact with staff and students. The pictures in Fig 1 give an impression on both events, the lay-out of the event in the entrance hall, the materials created, and the level of interaction by students with their target audience. All materials created by students were tested, evaluated and reflected upon based on three key concepts of awareness raising: target audience, storytelling and graphical design. Fig. 1. Impressions of the actual awareness raising event organised at campus. Top left: Students and staff playing Jenga with questions to raise awareness on reducing food waste, 2024. Top right: Students raising awareness for waste recycling and separation at campus, 2023. Bottom left: crafted fridges by students to question people on their food storage behaviour in the fridge. Bottom right: crafted waste bins by students to question people on the waste separation habits. Pictures by staff and students, made available for publication purposes. At the start of the course, all participants assessed their storytelling, graphic design skills as well as their level of confidence to organize an awareness raising campaign as low, or in other words, they recognize that there is room for improvement. For course run in 2024, we collected also evidence hindsight by a written evaluation, which was filled in by only two out of four students. Both students indicated that they have sufficient confidence in creating awareness raising materials, whereas at the start they struggled to structure their story in a limited number of words. The same observation was made in the plenary feedback session for both years. Students became more confident in communicating a short message by creating materials that convey a call for action. Still, they remain self-critical and acknowledge that there is still room for further improvement. Table 1 provides an overview of the quotes taken from the reflection reports made at end of the course per student. We categorized quotes that reflected on skills in storytelling and quotes that reflected on organizational skills for awareness raising. We selected two quotes per student that indicated their perceived skill acquisition. Table 1. Overview of student’s quotes taken from reflection report, indicative of improved insights and confidence in raising awareness by storytelling and organisational skills of an actual awareness raising event Improved insights and confidence in telling convincing content Improved insights and confidence in organising a campaign and contact people • Starting this new course was a completely new experience for me. What came out was a complete surprise for me. We developed a complete event based on our own ideas and initiative, which I experienced as a very interesting, informative process. • One of the most important things, that I think we included in all the materials is: keep it simple. You want to convey a message to people that are just living their live. • We ourselves created the structure, which I like a lot. We made the division of responsibilities, we set the deadlines for ourselves. And I liked to structure the whole process from brainstorming to the day of the event. • We barely did any social media coverage, so this is something that could be focused on, would we do this a next time. • The most interesting thing I had was a discussion I had at the end with someone. The passion and the feeling of this person was noticeable and quite interesting. • I do think we helped a bit, both educating the general UT community to practice more sustainable behaviour, as gathering information about people’s knowledge. • I found all materials roughly equally difficult to make. The game was harder to conceptualise and required some brainstorming. By keeping it close to the real life context in which the problem arises, the action perspective is quite evident and people can immediately apply what they learned. • I am most proud of the game, because in all its simplicity I felt it was very effective at engaging a lot of people. • Hopefully, the emotions that surfaced during the event (disbelief, surprise, confusion) will prompt people to discuss this with colleagues and roommates, further spreading the message. • We collected data about people's behaviours towards waste separation, which can offer valuable info to narrow and target objectives more efficiently by stakeholders. • In my opinion, the call for action was, for the people who engaged in activities and videos, a changing point in their behaviour towards waste separation. • Personally, the most satisfying part was the participation. Many people were interested in the topic, asked for more information, and checked all the materials besides • We proudly engaged and informed about 100 participants who learned how to separate waste properly. • The main lesson that I took from this course is about timing in planning campaigns. The timeline was too ambitious, and we needed to discard some things we wanted to do. To consider a reasonable scope is not enough; one should also properly list one's resources and contemplate unexpected circumstances. • We designed our materials to present the same content in various formats, such as video, slide show, and game, ensuring participants engaged with the information repeatedly and from different perspectives. • Also, our communication skills improved among the team and with the participants. It was impressive to hold discussions in such a way that sparked curiosity in the audience • Communication within the team was facilitated through WhatsApp and MS Teams, where tasks were divided, progress was monitored, and feedback was shared. Team members supported each other, demonstrating a collaborative and positive approach. • We created a memorable and informative experience through fun activities and friendly discussions that participants will hopefully retain and implement in their daily routines. • The event was such a new and fun experience for me. • I got to work on my story telling skills and graphical designing. I also learned a lot about markeRng strategies and how to grasp the aSenRon of your targeted audience. • I am very proud that as a group of 4, we were able to pull off such an event where we all tried something new. We did something different and learned a lot from it. • For me approaching people and making small talk is a bit challenging. As an individual, I am happy about communicaRng with the audience on the event day. I was a liSle nervous and reluctant at the first few interacRons. But aXer that, I felt more confident and easier to approach the audience. • Storytelling was a crucial element in all the materials. The posters, movie, and event acRviRes were structured in a way that conveyed the message in short, standalone segments. • This experience showed me how much thought goes into event planning and how every design choice—whether font selecRon, colour schemes, or acRvity mechanics—carries intenRonality. • There were issues with punctuality and commitment. Next Rme, I would make expectaRons and responsibiliRes a formal discussion point from the beginning. This would help prevent miscommunicaRon and ensure that everyone is on the same page regarding deadlines, contribuRons, and availability. • This project taught me the significance of clear communicaRon and se[ng boundaries. • The video script was my first experience in scriptwriRng, and while I’m proud of the outcome, I wish I had more opportuniRes to refine this skill. Designing a cohesive narraRve with staRsRcal data and visual storytelling was challenging but rewarding. • I learned the importance of storytelling, teamwork, and adaptability in creaRng effecRve awareness materials. • As a group, we’re proud of how the campaign materials captured the audience's aSenRon and delivered a clear message. • We underesRmated the Rme needed to test the materials’ clarity with diverse stakeholders, which could have enhanced the outcomes. • This project was a great learning experience, showing how creaRve tools like games, videos, and posters can raise awareness and inspire real change. Working with stakeholders like WWF and university staff also helped us ensure that our message conRnues to spread. • Through this experience, I have learned that raising awareness is not just about presenRng facts, it is about engaging people in meaningful ways and making them feel personally connected to the issue. • While we had a good turnout, we realized that more strategic markeRng such as social media promoRon or outreach through university networks could have made the event even bigger. • In future projects, we would allocate more Rme for tesRng and refining materials to ensure everything runs as smoothly as possible. The quotes in Table 1 show that the students learnt on both aspects: enhancing their awareness raising and communication skills, and their project management skills to organise an actual event. In addition, some quotes are indicative of a boost in selfconfidence; proud on the materials created as well as on the engagement with the audience. Although the concepts behind successful awareness raising state that testing and evaluating materials before actual publishing is crucial, students realised only hindsight that they did not make sufficient time for timely testing. A lesson learnt by doing. Very satisfactory is the observation made by one of the program directors that this course is unique in its output: students are entirely in charge of the awareness raising event. Students created all materials: the email and poster announcements circulated in the weeks before the event up to the banners, video’s and interactive games shown during the events. Students were very active in the interaction with the people passing by; everyone was respectfully approached to engage with their awareness raising campaign. 4 CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS This course has boosted the student’s skills and self-confidence in two major aspects. First, their storytelling and awareness raising skills that support them building a game-changer’s attitude and second, their project management and organisational skills. The second aspect was not as such prescribed beforehand as a learning outcome by the course developers and teachers. However, it is such a striking point mentioned by all students that we can add it in a next course. It means we can use the task of organising an actual awareness raising event for a much wider learning context than intended beforehand. This task is very effective in addressing the learning outcomes on enhancing student’s awareness raising skills and involves deep learning, as intended in a mild CBL approach. Probably way more effective than some of more traditional assignments as the students are forced to take ownership of their learning activity . Therefore, we conclude that putting the responsibility of reaching the learning outcomes heavily with the students while the teachers mainly guide the process, is a very effective CBL teaching approach, in line with Membrillo-Hernández et al., (2019). We recognized that the number of students is low, but the outcomes are homogeneously showing a steep learning curve with all students. It is important to realise that this course is part of a series of courses that support students in acquiring a game-changer’s attitude to support society in transformation to new. We are proud that the Faculty recognises the need for teaching this professional skillset and made it part of the mandatory curriculum. 5 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The research is supported by NRO Senior Comenius grant project. We acknowledge the use of AI tools ChatGTP and CoPilot at the drafting stage as aid for understanding the concepts. We thank Bruce de Kok from WWF for his inspiring talk, support and discussion about use of social media for awareness raising. We gratefully acknowledge the students participating the Game-Changer’s skill courses and to everyone attending the Awareness Raising events, allowing the students to learn in practice.