Environmental audiovisual narratives in higher education: the music video as a transversal didactic strategy for education for sustainable development
Journal
Frontiers in Education
Date Issued
2026-06-12
Author(s)
Zurita-Lagos, Carolina
Type
Article
Abstract
Higher education institutions are facing a growing challenge: to train professionals who are not only technically competent, but also aware of their responsibility towards environmental sustainability. Despite the urgency of the global climate crisis and the commitments set out in the United Nations 2030 Agenda, sustainability education in universities remains fragmented and rarely integrated as a cross-disciplinary competence. This article examines the pedagogical potential of music videos with explicit environmental messages as digital narratives to foster sustainability awareness among university students, regardless of their field of study. Three video clips were selected from a corpus of twelve candidates, through explicit criteria that include cultural reach, centrality of the environmental message, and pedagogical suitability for higher education. Each case is analyzed through a narrative-environmental-SDG matrix that articulates audiovisual resources, environmental problems represented, responsible agents, scale of impact and links with the Sustainable Development Goals. From the analysis, a conceptual proposal for didactic application is derived in three phases such as pre-visualization, guided audiovisual analysis and professional transfer, based on the theory of significant learning and the pedagogy of digital narratives. The proposal is applicable transversally to university curricula and contributes to the intersection between digital narrative pedagogy and Education for Sustainable Development, identifying a culturally powerful and systematically underutilized resource for sustainability training in higher education. © 2026 Londoño-Proaño and Zurita-Lagos.