Ethical Storytelling and Sustainability in Media Education: Teaching Business "With a Heart" Through Canadian Case Studies

This paper presents a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) case study examining a sustained pedagogical approach that integrates ethical storytelling and sustainability into media, communication, and business-related education through Canadian case studies. Emerging during the COVID-19 pandemic as a reflective response to heightened awareness of social inequity, environmental vulnerability, and economic fragility, this approach has been implemented and refined over approximately five years across undergraduate courses in advertising, marketing, communication, social media, digital storytelling, analytics, and creative entrepreneurship. Rather than treating ethics and sustainability as supplementary topics, the pedagogy foregrounds what are described as “businesses with a heart”: enterprises that pursue commercial viability while remaining accountable to people, communities, and the environment. Using three Canadian small- and medium-sized enterprises—GROSCHE, Encircled, and Cuddle + Kind—as recurring case studies, students engage with real organizations to examine how ethical commitments are operationalized and communicated through branding, storytelling, and media practices. The cases represent a range of approaches to ethical business, including Certified B Corporations and purpose-driven companies without formal certification, allowing students to critically interrogate certification, transparency, and lived values. Informed by experiential learning principles and perspectives from the Environmental Humanities, the paper positions sustainability and ethics as cultural and communicative processes shaped through narrative, representation, and institutional practice. Drawing on anonymized student reflections reproduced with consent, the study identifies patterns of increased critical awareness, professional confidence, and values-based reflection. The paper argues that sustained, locally grounded, and case-based pedagogy offers a meaningful way to prepare students as reflective professionals and entrepreneurs capable of engaging with the ethical and environmental dimensions of contemporary media and business practice.