
A Story About Storying: Inspiring Through the History of the Grand Challenges for SoTL
By Lauren Scharff and Jennie Mills
The prologue
It is unextraordinary to assert that human beings think in stories. Since the earliest times, we have used stories to warn others of the dangers of the world and how we might overcome them. Stories enable us to travel across time and space, to connect with those who existed long before us and those who will come long after we are gone. Stories enmesh all the ways by which humans can make sense of the world and through synthesizing the affective, cognitive, sensory, social, embodied, spiritual, and aesthetic domains, stories help us come to know differently. We story ourselves into being, and through being we weave boundless stories – not one story but many. While stories may follow familiar patterns – from Vonnegut’s plot shapes to Booker’s seven basic plots, and myriad storytelling traditions and forms that echo through many cultures – they remain endlessly generative, and are a powerful tool for communication.
The story of the five Grand Challenges for SoTL spans years and crosses continents – a global collaboration which hopes to elevate the value and standing of SoTL work. The Grand Challenges for SoTL hope to promote new and far-reaching collaborations as SoTLers work together to address the most complex and significant challenges in teaching and learning. However, this blog is not about the challenges themselves. The ISSOTL website provides fleshed-out descriptions of the five challenges. Instead, in this post we share the creation story of the Grand Challenges of SoTL, as it illustrates the power of community over committee, where voices from around the world came together to chart our path forward.
As with any story, there are many ways to tell it. You can read a more detailed history of the formal process of identifying the Grand Challenges for SoTL on the ISSOTL website. However, those of us who led the identification process hope that the story of their creation is more than a summary of steps. Through sharing this story, we hope to inspire more scholars to join this growing network and shape the future of SoTL together. We believe that the five Grand Challenges for SoTL are themselves stories of possibility – structured invitations to collaborative innovation where the ending remains unwritten.
So, in this blog, we 1) share how Lauren came to tell the story of the Grand Challenges in a more creative and imaginative way at ISSoTL 2024, and 2) invite you to bring together the stories of your past and the SoTL tools of heart, hand, and mind to imagine many futures for the Grand Challenges.
Are you sitting comfortably? Then we’ll begin our sharing of the creation of a “fairytale history” of the Grand Challenges for SoTL.
Once upon a time . . .
by Lauren Scharff
During the months leading up to ISSOTL 2024 I considered a variety of ways to begin my plenary talk on the topic of the Grand Challenges for SoTL. Of course I wanted to start with something engaging! When I thought about telling the 5-year history (or saga through COVID) of the efforts to determine the grand challenges, in my mind I immediately defaulted to starting with “Once upon a time….” (Yes, I enjoyed fairytales as a child, lol.) Then in September of that year, I had the opportunity to hear Kendall Haven give a talk titled, Your Brain on Story. He and many other researchers have noted the power of stories to help us make sense of events, as well as remember and share those events with others. His talk convinced me that opening with a story was what I wanted to do. So – then I just had to write and illustrate it!
Writing the story was relatively painless – after all, I had personally lived the story, and I just had to translate it into “fairytale” language. My good friend and colleague Sarah Robinson (also an avid fiction reader) provided helpful feedback to finesse the writing (thanks Sarah!). Then I had to tackle the illustrations. Initially I was less sure about how I’d go about that effort. I had imagery in my mind, but not enough time to create the images myself by hand, and I knew I wouldn’t find what I wanted through available open source images. Fortuitously, for several months I had been working with an interdisciplinary group of colleagues at my institution to develop a SoTL proposal to study the impact of using AI. We had a panel discussion scheduled and one of those colleagues, Jason Christopher, used Copilot AI to create a great image for the event flyer. I immediately asked him to give me a quick tutorial. I had tried using AI to create an image over a year earlier, and it was a failed experience. Using his pointers (thanks Jason!), I felt ready to give it another try.
The image creation process was fun, frustrating, and sometimes laughable. My first, and most frustrating, hurdle was to get Copilot to reasonably capture my imaginings of what “wicked grand challenges” might look like. I started with “complex, dark entities.” That phrase led to many variations of images that had dark, roughly humanoid figures with glowing eyes. Not what I wanted!!
I substituted “thing” for “entity” and made more progress. The picture below finally captured the essence of my vision. I was also able to use it to further refine my terminology – the grand challenges could be described as “dark, complex, fractal, geometric, things.”
After that, I worked with Copilot to create the images that went along with the story. Although each image almost always took more than one try with the prompt wording, it went smoothly for the most part. The second biggest hurdle was to prevent Copilot from putting magic wands in the hands of the instructors who were battling the grand challenges. If only we could use magic!! But, even though it was a fairytale, I didn’t want my fairytale analogy for the real grand challenges to imply that magic would be necessary to tackle the grand challenges. So, I had to explicitly tell Copilot each time in my prompts that the instructors did not use magic and did not have magic wands. Additionally, there were a couple of other images where I ended up combining pieces from two results to better capture what I was envisioning.
You can access the final story on the Grand Challenges website, along with the images as they were presented in French Lick at the 2024 ISSoTL Conference. I hope you enjoy it.
Choosing our ending to the story . . .
What is one moral of this story? Well, stories capture what we know but can also challenge us to break free from familiar patterns. We are not GenAIs trained to foresee the future only based on patterns from the past (e.g., we won’t be able to use magic wands for wicked problems despite how often that imagery has appeared in immensely popular fiction). We are human – messy, creative, storying beings, and perhaps that is exactly what our Grand Challenges need.
During the plenary, Lauren ended her “fairytale” story with the following:
“How will the story end? Is this really just a fairy tale story about a make-believe world?”
“As many of you may have already guessed, this “fairytale story” is an analogy to a real story that has happened in the past few years, and its ending, too, is still to be determined.”
By inhabiting stories and story worlds, we can imagine possible futures – try them on, walk with them for a while, and choose our own adventure. We invest our stories not only with our hopes and fears, but also with our values and what we value. And so, we invite you to join us in this shared endeavour: to help write the next chapters of our Grand Challenges for SoTL story. Now it’s your turn to pick up the story . . . where will you take it?