Towards a game-changers' attitude: boosting confidence in storytelling by awareness raising

As society is facing significant challenges, universities need to deliver game-changers 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 latter was an unforeseen side-effect that we treasure and will be further embedded in the future.