Metaphor and Personal Story: Teaching Communication, Creative-Critical Thinking and Collaboration

Abstract

Many learners and educators struggle to keep pace with the capacity-building needs and essential skill requirements of unknown, unpredictable futures. As educators, we must ask what might be the essential skills learners need to mobilize personal agency and positive social change in an interconnected world? How might global competencies transfer to, and be translated in, futures marked by demographic shifts, technological advances and geo-political tensions? This chapter proposes the specific global competencies of empathetic communication, equitable collaboration and ethical, creative-critical thinking as essential skills for all times, in all ages, whether interconnected, isolationist or fragmented, and for all learners despite cultural, social, biological and neurological diversities. However, the question remaining is how to engage learners with essential skills in a way that is relevant, meaningful and retainable for the various scenarios they will encounter over time and provide cognitive and imaginative tools for learners to internalize the mindsets necessary to think and act in and on the world that builds empathetic communication, equitable collaboration and ethical creative-complex thinking skills? This chapter shares the practices and findings of the author’s interdisciplinary action research projects (2018, 2020) that explore the impact of (1) cognitive inclinations, (2) 3D-Briefing and (3) metaphor and story-building to the teaching and learning of communication, collaboration and critical thinking for a changing world.