Environmental Communication Pedagogy and Practice

Tema Milstein, Mairi Pileggi, Eric L Morgan, Tema Milstein, Mairi Pileggi, Eric L Morgan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317203469
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Given the urgency of environmental problems, how we communicate about our ecological relations is crucial. Environmental Communication Pedagogy and Practice is concerned with ways to help learners effectively navigate and consciously contribute to the communication shaping our environmental present and future.

The book brings together international educators working from a variety of perspectives to engage both theory and application. Contributors address how pedagogy can stimulate ecological wakefulness, support diverse and praxis-based ways of learning, and nurture environmental change agents. Additionally, the volume responds to a practical need to increase teaching effectiveness of environmental communication across disciplines by offering a repertoire of useful learning activities and assignments. Altogether, it provides an impetus for reflection upon and enhancement of our own practice as environmental educators, practitioners, and students.

Environmental Communication Pedagogy and Practice is an essential resource for those working in environmental communication, environmental and sustainability studies, environmental journalism, environmental planning and management, environmental sciences, media studies and cultural studies, as well as communication subfields such as rhetoric, conflict and mediation, and intercultural. The volume is also a valuable resource for environmental communication professionals working with communities and governmental and non-governmental environmental organisations.

Part I
(Re)conceptualizing the
environmental
communication classroom

These chapters focus specifically on ways educators are orienting the environmental communication classroom found in many colleges and universities and how they can (re)orient and (re)locate the classroom.

1 Negotiating knowledge and advocating change

Teaching for transformative practice

Garrett Stack and Linda Flower

Environmental rhetoric is a transformative force working change on self and society, even within the special context of college education. Practicing environmental rhetoric can lead individual students to explore, challenge, and locate their own understanding and values within that of a larger discourse community, including their peers. It can also draw them into translating that negotiated understanding into a public act. Students prepared to speak as environmental advocates are often ideally positioned to enter local publics, those spaces where people may face a shared problem—but do so from differing perspectives, concerns, assumptions or values. It is these two sorts of rhetorical work, negotiating self-knowledge and advocating social change, that can help environmental pedagogy realize its potential as a transformative force.

We find it helpful to think of this transformative model of environmental communication in two ways: first, as a set of challenging roles it assigns to student communicators and, second, as a repertoire of powerful, but frequently demanding, communication practices. That is, the student as a knowledge-negotiator must analyze, synthesize, and respond to a wide variety of arguments about the environment. As a public advocate, that student must not only make a meaningful contribution to an issue or need, but also draw a public itself into the adaptive work of change, addressing conflict and reframing a shared problem. This chapter will draw on our experience adapting this approach to environmentally focused communication courses as well as advanced seminars in environmental rhetoric. Across these differences, the common thread is an outward-bound focus on rhetorical engagement in a larger community and on an experimental, strategic, and reflective stance on one’s own rhetorical action.

To work towards transformation, this chapter outlines two roles for students to inhabit. As a knowledge-negotiator in environmental discussions, students work to understand and respond to specific case-based environmental issues in ways that privilege analysis, composition, and a problem-solving process. Learning to formulate reasoned opinions within a diverse set of existing beliefs and arguments, students are also beginning to enter the discourse of environmentalism and its complex arguments.

A second student role, which we call the public advocate, approaches environmental rhetoric in order to engage in its public discourse and debate: to enter the field and learn its history, discourse, and values, which shape what people do. Reading and comparing the communications of naturalists, scientists, policy makers, and activists lets the student look at how competing discourses define one’s relationship to the natural world, frame environmental problems, or argue for public action. Turning analysis into rhetorical strategy prepares the student public advocate to make a genuine contribution as a public communicator.

When the two approaches are treated as a transformative process, environmental communication offers fertile ground to plant seeds for students-as-negotiators to develop responsible communicative practices regardless of—or in addition to—personal opinion. A deeper study of the subtexts surrounding current political and social debates leads students-as-advocates to a more focused study of environmental rhetoric and encourages students to find stakes in this critical set of public choices and contribute meaningfully beyond the classroom.

The knowledge-negotiator

In their article on pedagogy and sustainability, Sprain and Timpson (2012, 342) argue that:

students typically arrive at college thinking in very dichotomous ways, i.e., ideas are right or wrong, that reality is black or white. When these students begin to hear divergent opinions in college, when they begin to see the complexity in the issues they study, they open up to the “greyness” in life.

Positioning students as knowledge-negotiators requires, first and foremost, the construction and support of responsible discourse practices that privilege a wide variety of environmentally focused communications. This positioning helps students to see themselves as not only negotiating the range of topics and opinions that exist about various environmental topics, but also negotiating effective ways of communicating about these topics themselves. As Gregory Clark (2002) argues, many students enter communication courses with a grounding in the five-paragraph theme, but we may be doing students a disservice by failing to teach a more rigorous means of communicating that would encourage not only more awareness of context and community, but would also provide them with skills that are transferable across other departments within the university, and beyond.

As an alternative, Clarke urges breaking away from the perception that writing exists merely inside of genres that act as containers for text-as-object and suggests instead focusing on writing and classroom discussion as participating in “public discourse” (ibid., 111). One such way of framing the notion of public discourse within the environmental communication (EC) classroom is to focus on case studies. As Sprain and Timpson (2012, 533) suggest, case studies offer students a way to access real-world situations and apply rigorous analysis to develop creative solutions, and argue that “case studies are a productive approach to teaching about sustainability and teaching for sustainability.” According to the authors, this pedagogical tool has interdisciplinary (and transdisciplinary) applications that allow for more productive collaboration within and beyond academia¹ (ibid., 534). Mindfulness of the importance of public discourse is a necessary pedagogical practice for EC, and case studies are indeed an excellent way to approach public discourse within the classroom with an eye towards inter(trans)disciplinary communication. The model we utilize for this course is developed around the presentation, discussion, and written response to increasingly complicated case studies, which culminate in a final paper in response to a particular EC issue.

However, our course diverges from the Sprain and Timpson model in that what we suggest is not the abandonment of teaching about sustainability for sustainability—and/or other important environmental issues—but to delay the impetus to teach for a particular environmental agenda until students have had the time to reach their own conclusions about the issues under discussion. The knowledge-negotiator practice adds a way of re-envisioning the EC classroom as a site for instruction and as a community wherein communicative exchange occurs to help students begin to understand and negotiate environmental public discourse. Our model for such a classroom conception comes from Jurgen Habermas’s notion of the European “salon” at the turn of the eighteenth century. For Habermas (1989: 33), the salon represented a shift in what was considered “public” from the buildings of state to locations where nobility might join the bourgeois stratum to engage in lively discussions in which “the mind was no longer in the service of the patron; ‘opinion’ became emancipated from the bonds of economic dependence.” The concept of the salon was a novel one at the time because one’s social stratum (the prince or the watchmaker) did not matter, and there were no consequences for disagreement; all ideas were given equal consideration. This concept may feel familiar to any instructor who opens a topic for discussion and watches as students, from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds, all have an opportunity to voice their opinion.

If this feels redundant (why must we label a model that is already in common practice?), it is important to note an additional function the salon played in its time: it was a site not only for exchanging ideas, but also for vetting them. As Habermas contends:

There was scarcely a great writer in the eighteenth century who would not have first submitted his essential ideas for discussion in such discourse, in lectures before the academies and especially in the salons. The salon held the monopoly of first publication: a new work, even a musical one, had to legitimate itself first in this forum.

(Ibid., 34)

The salon then functioned as a kind of peer review, where all ideas, the good and bad, were discussed and weighed equally before being dismissed, reimagined, or approved as sound and novel. Envisioning the EC classroom as a salon, we begin to see it taking on a new shape as an ideal space for public deliberation about environmental case studies: ideas are circulated and vetted throughout the semester through course discussions, readings, and assignments, thus allowing students to negotiate a wide variety of arguments and opinions to give them ample time to reach conclusions of their own.

Adopting the notion of the classroom-as-salon means first privileging discussion of environmental case studies, the free exchange of ideas responding to this corpus, the mutual vetting process, and then positioning the students within the salon as negotiators whose responsibility it is to make sense of the texts within the context of this community. Simultaneously, students are building the communication skills needed to express their opinions beyond the classroom, thus encouraging the interdisciplinarity of course content and communicative practices. However, it is up to the instructor to design a set of practices that are based on case studies to attain flow across a variety of environmental issues and provide real-world environmental situations. First, by introducing basic arguments about the environment, instructors may simultaneously begin a discussion of environmental issues while guiding students through the basics of argumentative structure.² As the course progresses, adding increasingly complex case studies³ to the corpus helps students to become more aware of the nuanced opinions that exist in the debates over current environmental issues, the history of the environmental movement, and the socio-political context within which these arguments exist, while at the same time aiding students to analyze, interpret, and synthesize these arguments as negotiators. By situating these tasks within the framework of environmental case studies, and by engaging students in open debates throughout the semester concerning these environmental problems, the students will feel engaged as negotiators in the subject material while building their rhetorical skills. Ideally, they will feel ready and willing to form their own opinions and share them (via a circulated paper based on a case of their own choosing⁴) with their peers, thus participating in the vetting process of the salon model.

The second positioning required within the knowledge-negotiator salon involves the role of the instructor. Taking into account our passionate attachments and intellectual histories,⁵ how can EC instructors best position students as knowledge-negotiators within a salon—which privileges open debate and the free exchange of ideas—without sacrificing the instructors’ own opinions, knowledge, and beliefs concerning environmental issues? We suggest instructors envision themselves as hosts, similar to ones found in political debates, to allow the introduction of ideas and the curating of diverse opinions without forcing students to think one way or another about particular environmental problems. Another way to consider the concept of the instructor/salon relationship is via the “classroom as ecosystem.” Under this notion, “[instructors] conceive of educational settings like classrooms as constituting systems akin to biological ecosystems, and propose that research focus on the relationships among the various elements present in the classroom environment” (Guerrettaz and Johnston 2013, 782). As humans are currently demonstrating, any ecosystem can be destroyed when an overconsumptive element is introduced, and an instructor who overburdens students with his or her own opinions may be unbalancing the delicate scales of the salon negotiation process.

The debate over advocacy in the classroom is a rich one, and a number of opinions have been produced about its role in the educational process.⁶ We are not asking instructors to discard their own passionate attachments to environmentalism but ask them instead to provide a corpus of case studies representing all sides of an argument so students might reach their own conclusions through the open discussion of the salon model. Here, instructors refrain from voicing their opinions directly (i.e., teaching for sustainability), and ask questions that generate further discussion. So instead of explaining the problems inherent in an oil-dependent energy economy, an EC instructor might provide a case study of a college’s attempts to divest itself of oil-generated income, highlighting both the pros and cons of the process.⁷ We are, in no way, supporting the view that a classroom free of an instructor’s advocacy is the best model; in fact, in the next section of this chapter we suggest transitioning the instructor role to one of environmental advocacy. However, for this particular model to work towards transfer, it is our belief that allowing students to engage properly in the salon community requires a free and open exchange of ideas that considers all opinions equally concerning each environmental issue.

As a result of this conscious choice of roles, the EC instructor allows the salon to function as a prerequisite to environmental advocacy, and in envisioning this course as the first step in a transformative process, the salon allows for the gradual construction of an advocatory opinion⁸ within the relative safety of the classroom-as-community. Positioning students within the salon as knowledge-negotiators serves a variety of functions:

• First and foremost, the salon model allows for open and engaging discussions that introduce and build an environmental corpus through which students negotiate a wide variety of opinions on a range of problems.

• Simultaneously, it requires students to practice active rhetorical analysis and to strengthen their communicative abilities so that they may function well as communicators in a multiplicity of situations within and beyond the university.

• And, finally, it encourages students to construct their own...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Introducing environmental communication pedagogy and practice
• Part I (Re)conceptualizing the environmental communication classroom
• Part II Diverse practices in teaching environmental communication
• Part III Transformative practice: nurturing change agents
• Part IV Environmental communication pedagogy and Practice toolbox
• Index