At the Verge of ‘Is’ and ‘Could Be’: Storytelling as Medium to Develop Critical Ethical Skills

Stories about the socio-technical impact of the outcomes of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) on the world may create a concrete sense of the future consequences they may cause. Such stories may offer students and early career researchers who (will) develop, test, and deploy such technologies insights into their effects on individuals, other living beings, the environment, and society. In this paper, we argue that this method, known as storytelling in academic literature, can be effectively used to embed ethics in higher learning curricula through its power to appeal to students’ hearts and minds. Through storytelling, ethics lessons that emerged throughout history can be taught in a memorable way and raise empathetic skills, while fictional stories may allow students to identify with the characters and contemplate possible ethical outcomes of a decision in a safe manner. We provide an overview of various fictional and nonfictional forms that can be used to improve students’ motivation and equip them with some innovative tools that can support ethical decision-making, including science fiction, digital storytelling, Virtual Reality, and videogames. In addition, we recommend that ethics training via storytelling should be embedded as early as possible as integrated nodes into existing STEM curricula to stimulate empathy and critical thinking skills in students and to supplement existing rule-based education.