Every year in February, Leuphana University in the small town of Lüneburg in Germany, organises a conference week that forms the collective final for all first-year Bachelor students.

At the first-ever completely virtual conference week in 2021, Lighthouse, together with Senan Gardiner, Sharie Wuttke, Jo Linn Thurau, Tom Reckmann and Sarah Jung hosted a seminar plenary with 57 students using both the Zoom and Padlet software programmes.

Under the title question ‘How I met sustainability: the stories we tell ourselves of our own engagement with sustainability’, participants were able to dive into storytelling and narrative methodology in small groups in two facilitated steps. On two whiteboards, the stories were first written and then restructured according to the frameworks of scientific experts on storytelling in order to finally reflect on commonalities and differences in the plenary.

Leuphana students Sharie Wuttke, Jo Linn Thurau, Tom Reckmann and Sarah Jung are working on a small research project to evaluate the seminar plenary. We are looking forward to present their results soon!

We say thank you to all students who participated and to the team of Leuphana who organized the first digital conference week!

Here you can get a sneak peek of our virtual situation fire, which served as a collective stimulus for quietly telling stories individual to 57 on ‘Why did you get interested in sustainability?’

Virtual Narrative Spaces for Sustainability (Group Work – silent).