Abstract:

As the United Nations has highlighted with its ambitious Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, inequalities within and outside countries continue to weigh down the development of our societies and exacerbate social divisions. According to several studies such as the Report on Global Inequality (World Inequality Lab, 2018) or the Sustainable Development Goals Report (UN, 2020), despite the progress in recent decades, the improvement on issues of equality and inclusion continues being disparate according to regions and groups.

Universities have a critical role to play on this ground. Firstly, including SDGs in their curricula, and secondly offering students skills and competencies that will help society address challenges on social justice and sustainable development.

This study shows a proposal that is being developed at the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) throughout different degrees and subjects related to communication and audio-visual content. Grounded on the Theoretical framework PALAR (Ortrun Zuber-Skerritt, 2015) that promotes working effectively in small groups and using predominantly qualitative research methods, the project proposes the active consideration of students as members of a learning community that collaborates and shares experiences of civic participation through designing, creating and distributing audio-visual content on social inclusion and to condemn inequalities. SDG 5 (Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls) and SDG 10 (Reduce inequality within and among countries) are especially relevant for this project.

The objective of this study is to highlight and justify the relevance of innovative methodologies in higher education as a crucial key competence for students becoming leaders in promoting the achievement of SDGs.

Furthermore, this study highlights the relevance of improving and transforming the undergraduate student’s role from a mere consumer to one more inclined to promote social changes thanks to adopting the position of someone who suffers from inequality. This phenomenon, which in the field of psychosociology is known as Perspective Taking (or cognitive dimension of empathy, Gehlbach et al., 2012; Zaki, 2014) becomes an essential ally in the design of audio-visual storytelling in this needed proactive shift.

Keywords:

Perspective taking, Sustainable Development Goals, Audio-visual content, PALAR methodology.