Eye in the Storm
How to achieve climate neutrality, creating value to stakeholders.
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I. About Eye in the Storm
Spark a crucial, transversal conversation about the impact of climate change on all aspects of our lives and demonstrate that climate change is a collective action challenge.
Eye In the Storm is a three-tier immersive experience into climate change mitigation and adaptation. When joining the face-to-face session, the student will have travelled through an emotional, somehow overwhelming, personal experience in the midst of a hurricane using a VR headset.
She or he will have also worked, either individually or collectively, one of five key decision-makers in the conversation for climate change through a multimedia material.
Together, the two materials should have prepared the students for a role-based class discussion on action against climate change.
Part 1: The VR immersion
An emotional experience, meant to create a first-hand attachment to the problem.
What the student experiences via VR has been designed to trigger emotional engagement with the challenge; the discussion in class is rather designed to channel those emotions in a compelling way, using analytical rather than value judgements.
The VR immersion is of 8-9 min duration and can be organized with drop-in hours in the XR Lab, where students would have VR headsets available for use.
Part 2: The multimedia role-play
Understand the position of a stakeholder involved in making decisions about climate change action. Explore real examples and theoretical backgrounds of the assigned role. Prepare a strategy for class discussion to find a solution that meets personal and collaborative goals.
To mitigate the effects of climate change, it is crucial that stakeholders from all sectors and nationalities come together to act in unison, and determine the best path forward. In this multimedia material, faculty assigns a role to each student. These roles represent select key stakeholders, decision makers, and affected individuals in the conversation on climate change.
Once a role has been assigned, the student will be presented with information and activities about the role. The objective is to understand this role, complete the associated activities, and save responses in preparation for the class discussion.
Students will also have a chance to study the basics characteristics of the other roles assigned to their peers. This is crucial, as they will be part of a class debate with the other roles on the best action plan to mitigate climate change.
Sample of downloadable Role Sheet
Students are presented with the discussion goals for their role and have to formulate their strategy for achieving their goals in the discussion.
Students are also prompted to write down how they plan to approach the other players to reach a satisfactory outcome for all people involved.
Students can download the decision summary to bring it with them to the class discussion.
Part 3: The facilitated class discussion
Spark a crucial, transversal conversation about the impact of climate change on all aspects of our lives and demonstrate that climate change is a collective action challenge.
The session will be organized as a facilitated class discussion. Students should get into the characters of the city mayor, the CEO of an energy utility, a local business owner, a journalist, and an environmental scientist from a coastal city affected by a hurricane. The session, though, has not been designed to lead to a dialectics that finally casts winners and losers. Unless there is a win-win situation at the end of the session, no one wins. As with climate change, either we all win, or we all lose.
The key learning objectives are related to the collective action nature of the challenge and the need to master complexity, rather than uptaking simplistic approaches in the design and implementation of solutions.
Make sure students have gone through the VR experience and the multimedia material ahead of the session with you.
This learning experience gives students a deeper understanding of how collaborative systems approach has the potential to address complex challenges. Through role-playing, students will learn how institutional roles, relative priorities of different stakeholders, individual personalities and motivations, diverse incentives and backgrounds, affect interactions and the ability to build consensus among the class attendees (and citizens at large).
Students will gain a greater appreciation for the importance of building trust and meaningful relationships and will understand why it may well take several years (if not decades) for collaborative approaches and social learning to build cohesive and institutional bonds.
Need educator access to the material?
Please request further information to iepublishing@ie.edu
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