Facing Gaia in Education: A Storytelling Framework for Teaching Sustainability in Management

‘Facing Gaia’ is inspired by Bruno Latour who in his recent work has suggested that Gaia—Mother Earth—has now taken centre stage in politics. Ultimately universities are therefore submitted to a new climatic regime which demands responsibility and action from them. Inspired by Hannah Arendt, this chapter suggests a storytelling framework for teaching sustainability in management education. Storytelling is seen as a means for ‘emplacing’ and ‘rooting’ people in the terrestrial conditions of Gaia. In such storytelling, actors are submitted to a multispecies storytelling in a terrestrial politics. I identify seven storytelling principles of such terrestrial management education: Self-formation addresses the need that management becomes a matter of self-formation; problem-oriented learning emphasizes the need that learning becomes organized around practical problems; multispecies storytelling implies organizing management education with an explicit focus on the biosphere goals (water, air, life on land, life in the water); gaiagraphy implies using methods to understand the relations between nature, society, and organizational activities; governance implies organizing management as an intersectional practice across different professions; truth-telling is to train management students to appear and speak with frankness and honesty and to engage problems that concern the marginalized; finally, storytelling requires deep reflexive practices so that students can make personal values clear.