Storytelling for Impact: Resources to Support Communication for Globally Responsible Engineering

Effective communication is essential within engineering education and practice, especially when needing to work with diverse stakeholders, establish credibility, evidence impact, and articulate visions for the future. Communication skills are therefore critical to fostering trust, generating ideas, cultivating relationships and shaping a culture capable of meeting ambitious goals towards more globally responsible engineering that prioritizes ethics, sustainability, and equity. Resources such as the Lemelson Foundation's Engineering for One Planet Framework, the Engineering Professors' Council's Ethics and Sustainability Toolkits, and Engineers Without Borders UK's Reimagined Degree Map all support the teaching and development of communication skills, but they also underpin the ability to tell a new story around the power of transforming engineering for positive change. This workshop harnesses these resources to equip participants with the additional communication tool of storytelling. Analyzing examples of effective storytelling in engineering and learning key storytelling techniques will enable participants to understand how storytelling practices can increase their own efficacy in communicating stories of change, and how a storytelling approach is relevant to student communication learning outcomes.