The Elasticity of Storytelling: An Unsolved Challenge in HCI Education

Drawing on our collective experience as educators and preliminary results of an in-progress research study, we explore the complexities of integrating storytelling into Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) education. Within the user experience (UX) industry, storytelling is considered essential for collaborating, engaging stakeholders, and shaping professional identities. However, despite that importance, effectively teaching storytelling presents an unsolved educational challenge in HCI. We begin by examining storytelling's multifaceted and elastic nature in UX practice and how that contributes to the challenge of teaching it, demonstrating key points with quotes and anecdotes from our ongoing research. We then discuss various pedagogical approaches to help students understand good storytelling, practice their storytelling skills, and better appreciate how storytelling can shape their academic and professional success. We hope that by sharing what we are grappling with as we investigate UX storytelling in practice, we can engage the EduCHI community in productive discussions to help us move our collective teaching practices forward.