Environmental Communication Pedagogy and Practice (original) (raw)

2017, Environmental Communication Pedagogy and Practice

In response to continuing environmental crises in the US and globally, this volume offers a broad, richly-veined survey of some of the current pedagogical theories, rationales, and practices in the still emerging field of environmental communication. This 'first attempt' (2) is ambitious and is best approached as a mapping of pedagogy-as-practiced in which its 28 chapters chart a range of approaches and applied perspectives in environmental communication (EC) classrooms and in the field. Consistent with the growing international interest in EC, contributors to the volume hail from Japan, Australia, Sweden, Germany, Italy, Oman, and Canada as well as the US. The impetus for the volume emerged from a gathering of educators and practitioners at the 2014 National Communication Association conference in Chicago. They were grappling with questions about pedagogical approaches in what is most accurately described as a transdisciplinary field of environmental communication (Cox and Depoe 2015). Reflecting a range of disciplines and specialties-rhetorical studies, journalism, sustainability science, ecology, communication, media studies, social change/justice studies, performance, climate change communication, and natural resource management, among others-the resulting volume reports those educators' experiments with new conceptual, theoretical, and practical approaches toward addressing the challenges of communication about the environment and our relationships with the natural world. In their approaches to EC education, the volume's authors claim to 'challenge traditional or time-worn ways of engaging in pedagogy' (3). In doing so, the book showcases innovative practices and efforts to test alternative theories in environmentally-themed communication curricula and, as such, may also be of interest to those concerned with the research/practitioner divide. Even so, the editors insist certain basic pedagogical goals are shared across these diverse endeavors. These curricula strive to '[1] stimulate learners in ecological wakefulness, [2] support diverse and praxis-based ways of learning, and [3] nurture environmental change agents' (i). In illustrating the array of principles and practices in support of these goals, the editors have structured this volume in four parts: