How much can the stories we hear influence our morals? Can we shape and weave stories to our advantage to tackle the sustainability issues that we face by facilitating the development of morals that support sustainability concern? Spearman and Eckhoff (2012) have said that gaining these moral views in childhood is important for providing a foundation on which future sustainability behaviours are built. But how will we know if it has worked?
The benefits of storytelling as an educational tool have long been discussed (Glonek & King, 2014; Gold & Holman, 2001; Bullough 2010), even if the tool has fallen out of favour at times within the school environment being under the pressure of the test and examination culture that dominates the classroom, and the ever increasing use of technology (Mistry, 2017; Bullough, 2010). But with live storytelling offering more creative ways of imparting knowledge retention, as well as the development of critical thinking skills, it is a technique that can offer schools an engaging route to learning (Mistry, 2017; Colwell, 1980).
A story “Unintended Consequences” was written by the researcher. It follows the main character as they journey through a world troubled by water inequality, showing the impact this has on different communities, and how these inequalities came about. The story aims to create concern and an understanding for how water is used, from direct point of use, through to embedded water within food and the manufacture of goods.
The story is to be delivered to children aged 8-9 years in 4 different ways, including live storytelling and magical performance built around the story. In order to quantify how impactful the story is in its different guises, the children will have their moral scores tested before and after the story intervention at set intervals. Whilst moral scores have been found to be static over time in an adult population (Graham et al, 2011), children at this age are undergoing active moral development (Colby et al, 1987). It is therefore proposed that the children’s scores will change following the story, and ‘The Moral Foundation Vignettes tool’ will be used to quantify this change (Clifford et al, 2015). Work by Jasson and Dorrepaal (2015) found that there is a strong correlation between high scores within the ‘Care’ and ‘Fairness’ orientations and pro sustainability behaviour, so it can be theorised that a change in morals would also lead to a change in behaviour.
Based on the literature, it is proposed that the groups receiving the magical performance will show the greatest change in moral scores; this is due to the magic sessions benefiting from the merits of a storytelling performance, but also those of magic, which have been found to promote the uptake of educational messages (Lin et al, 2017; Krell and Dobson, 1999), as well as promote critical thinking (Dougherty, 2004);  however, there has been criticisms of how robust the empirical research into the impact of magical performance has been (Wiseman & Watt, 2020).

The moral reasoning of the children will be tested before and following the story delivery at set intervals. This is to provide a direct comparison on whether the children changed their views because of the story they received. Different questions will be used in each session so the children cannot try to replicate their previous responses, but the questions are similar enough, and cover similar themes to enable comparisons between the two sets of responses to be made. The test to be used is based on the Moral Foundation Theory (MFT), as this was developed to be more appropriate to all in society (Giammarco, 2015; Jansson and Dorrepaal, 2015). Specifically, the test to be used is the Moral Foundation Vignettes (MFV) developed by Clifford et al. (2015), which provides a standard list of scenarios/vignettes, a selection of which have been identified as being appropriate for use with children. Twelve vignettes were selected from the list devised by Clifford et al (2015) with six to be assigned to the first exercise and six to the second. More questions were selected from the ‘Care’ orientation as a correlation has been found in adults between responses to these vignettes and individuals stating sustainability behaviours (Jasson and Dorrepaal, 2015). In addition, twelve new Sustainability Vignettes were created as part of this research, six per session, to pose more direct scenarios related to resource use, as Jasson and Dorrepaal (2015) also found that direct sustainability questions were still the best indicator of positive sustainability behaviours. An example of a Vignette is shown below: • You see a girl laughing at another student forgetting her lines at a school play. The children will be asked to state how ‘wrong’ they felt these actions were on a 5 point Likert Scale, ranging from ‘Not at all wrong’ to ‘Extremely wrong’. It is proposed that roughly 1000 children will receive one of the four story sessions in classroom groups. The results from each child will be compared to explore the range of change individually, but will also be aggregated up for the class, and again for the entire group type to give a picture of the change for each story delivery type. These results will then be reviewed and compared for any statistical differences between the four story delivery types.

The use of the MFV in the way proposed in this paper is novel in a couple of ways. The first is in its use with children, as it has predominantly been used within an adult population, possibly due to the limited number of Vignettes that were identified as being appropriate for use with children (12/132). But the most significant development is in its use before and after an intervention to quantify the impact on the morals of a population of children. The tool was not designed to be used in this way, and this method would unlikely be useful with an adult population, however, as children are still said to be undergoing active moral development (Colby et al, 1987), it is believed changes in responses could be found following the interventions through storytelling and magic. The development of the additional sustainability vignettes also pushes the tool beyond its original boundaries, as the original list of 132 vignettes were largely built from the extensively tested Moral Foundation Questionnaire scenarios. However, as Jansson and Dorrepaal (2015) suggest, questions specifically related to sustainability are far better indicators of related sustainability behaviour, but none of the MFQ or MFV scenarios touch on this. It is therefore proposed that these additional vignettes could be useful to other researchers looking to measure the sustainability morals of a population.

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