The Place of the Teacher: Environmental Communication and Transportive Pedagogy

ABSTRACT

In this advanced review, we reflect on our own teaching and synthesise recent scholarship on higher education practices in order to examine the place of the teacher in environmental communication pedagogy. Most prior studies of environmental communication pedagogy have addressed on-campus or in-the-field teaching, with little attention paid to the challenges and opportunities of online or blended learning. We argue that environmental communication pedagogy must be reassessed in the context of the shift toward online instruction that the COVID-19 pandemic prompted, and we undertake this reassessment with a particular emphasis on the teacher’s “place.” Through a review of three different modalities of teaching, we propose a transportive lens for understanding the place of the teacher in environmental communication pedagogy, which takes into account the teacher’s place within the learning environment and acknowledges their role in guiding the movement of learners through pedagogic environmental communication places and praxis.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental communication pedagogy
• inside-out pedagogy
• online learning
• emplaced learning

Environmental communication pedagogy aims to build core competencies that empower students to solve wicked problems and participate in pro-environmental action. The “ethical duty” of the field (Cox, 2007) extends to educators, who, like environmental communication researchers and practitioners, seek to empower others to lead change during a time of ecological crisis. This is teaching for action: environmental communication pedagogy is committed to supporting sustainability outcomes (McGreavy et al., 2016, p. 261), encouraging “ecological citizenship” (Prody, 2017, p. 34), and co-creating our realities in order to inform thriving futures (Milstein, 2012). Educators in this field seek to help their students participate in environmental conversations taking place in and across ecocultures, media landscapes, and transforming public spheres, enabling them to become aware, ethical, and effective environmental communicators and change-makers.

Prior studies show that environmental communication educators have forged new pedagogical paths and developed innovative teaching models (Milstein et al., 2017b). This spirit of innovation has arisen due to the complex and often interdisciplinary nature of the problems environmental communication pedagogues are empowering their students to confront. Collaborative learning (McGreavy et al., 2016) and case study analysis (Sprain & Timpson, 2012) are often used to help students engage with the multifaceted social, economic, and ecological problems underpinning the environmental crisis, while experiential learning - in which "nature" is both educator and subject material - is a tried and tested tool for encouraging pro-environmental thinking (Phillips, 2017). The “inside-out” model of environmental communication pedagogy has been a particularly influential means of overcoming the limitations of conventional in-classroom teaching. This model seeks to “create transformative learning spaces in which learners’ inner concerns and passions find vital connection with their understandings of, and practices within, the wider biosphere” (Milstein et al., 2017a, p. 45). Inside-out pedagogy has a strong emphasis on place, seeing every place in which one teaches as offering “its own ecocultural complexity and wonder, situations and locations in which learners can engage, thrive, and identify their distinctive roles as both participants and change agents” (Milstein et al., 2017a, p. 55).

Most work on environmental communication pedagogy has addressed on-campus or in-the-field teaching, and with some notable exceptions (Mocatta, 2017; Pedelty & Hamilton, 2017) the challenges and opportunities of online, distance, or blended (in-person and online) learning have been neglected in these discussions. At the time of writing, however, we are seeing (and feeling) seismic changes in how higher education is delivered and experienced. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic led to a rush of emergency remote instruction at higher education institutions worldwide. As we emerge from the pandemic, educators across all fields are adapting to a changed educational landscape in which hybrid or blended models of learning are implemented, campus-based instruction has been decentered, and field study has been reimagined to suit an age of physical distancing and/or reluctance to travel. Yet even before the pandemic, the rise of digital learning technologies was creating shifts in ways we could or were expected to teach, with digital affordances leading to increased ease of access for a diverse range of students (Van Gijn-Grosvenor & Huisman, 2020). Indeed, online learning can allow students in regional and remote areas to learn while remaining in place in their local communities (O’ Shea et al., 2015; Stone & Springer, 2019). The future of higher education is likely to involve a mix of located, online, and blended experiences; learning environments will become more diverse, with in-person and online approaches and tools used in various combinations to support student engagement. These transformations are occurring alongside emerging expectations that students will graduate with the capabilities that allow them to tackle global challenges, including, and especially, climate change.

Today, in this complex and ever-evolving higher education landscape, environmental communication educators take on many roles in many places. The three authors writing this paper, for example, have been designers of online learning environments, leaders of immersive field studies, and facilitators of on-campus courses in classrooms. One of us has even been a bus driver, transporting students to learning experiences well beyond classroom walls. This lived experience of transportive teaching offers a metaphor to guide the synthesis that follows, a practice-based study on the place of the environmental communication teacher during unfolding and unprecedented times. In this review of our own teaching practice, we contend that environmental communication pedagogy must be reassessed in these transforming times, and in what follows we undertake such reassessment with an emphasis on the teacher’s place. We argue that the place of the teacher – within university systems, learning environments, and lived, valued spaces – has never been more important, and we propose that attention paid to the teacher’s place will strengthen the capacity of environmental communication educators to transport students to meaningful learning outcomes.

As part of this investigative reclaiming of the teacher’s place, we propose a transportive model of teaching. By “transportive,” we mean teaching that guides students towards a destination: a new position of knowledge, awareness, and capability to act. We also use this term to signify teaching that guides and supports movement between learning environments, and between “classroom” and “real world” experiences. There is a link here to “transformative learning” whereby students encounter ideas or perspectives that encourage a rethinking of previously held worldviews or assumptions (Robertson and Scheidler-Benns, 2016). However, our transportive model emphasises emplaced learning experiences (and emplaced teaching practices). Importantly, too, this is a model that extends across all modes of teaching and is inclusive of online delivery; indeed, it recognises the innovations that have been developed as educators in all fields adapted to teaching online, both prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through reflections on our own practices across three different modes of teaching, we examine the teacher’s place in environmental communication, define transportive teaching, and outline a set of commitments that have guided our own practice.

Environmental communication pedagogy and place

An investigation of the teacher’s “place” is concerned with an educator’s “presence” as well as their “role,” but it is also concerned with other social, emotional, ecological, and metaphoric components of place. As Dickinson reminds us, places are “physical, cultural, and even imaginary sites that are differentiated and emotionally meaningful to people” (2011, p. 302). Cresswell reflects that “place is not just a thing in the world but a way of understanding the world” (2004, p. 11), and similarly, Adams and Gynnild argue that “place is far more than location. It is an accumulation of experience and an epistemology. Both evolve and deepen over time becoming part of one’s self-image and identity” (2013, p. 116). Drawing on these definitions, our understanding of the teacher’s place involves embeddedness in geographical locations as well as “a range of social and ecological relationships” (Gislason et al., 2021, p. 534), in addition to the teacher’s role, presence, and involvement in higher education systems and institutions. Our place as teachers, then, includes our role, our presence, our identity, and our connection to real and virtual geographies, as well as our familiarity with the contours of our teaching and disciplinary landscapes. It also involves our capacity not just to design effective learning environments but to guide students through these physical and/or virtual spaces. Returning to our initial metaphor, we propose that environmental communication pedagogy has transportive aspects, but we also emphasise that the bus does not drive itself.

In doing so, we are mindful of both recent and longstanding work on place and place-based practices within the scholarship of environmental communication. Carbaugh and Cerulli (2013, p. 14) describe environmental communication as “a place-based form of communication,” while Carbaugh (1996, p. 38) reminds us that communication itself can be “conceived as radically and doubly “placed”, as both located in places and as locating particular senses of those places.” Thompson and Cantrill, too, focus on the “the communicative construction of place” in their introduction to the flagship journal Environmental Communication’s special issue on place (2013, p. 1), pointing out that “our communication practices may be the only thing that separate us from abject space and the beloved places we hope to preserve” (2013, p. 3)., while Milstein et al. (2011) point to ways more culturally emplaced communication integrates (rather than separating) us with place through forefronting relationality. In addition to this understanding of communication as an emplacing and emplaced practice, recent scholarship has paid attention to the effectiveness of place-based communication as a means of engaging diverse audiences on environmental issues. Importantly, researchers have found that the incorporation of a sense of place and the provision of place-based information in online environmental messages strengthens the ability of communicators to build interest in environmental problems (Adams & Gynnild, 2013). More specifically, researchers have found climate communication is most effective when it addresses and engages people in a place-based manner (Gislason et al., 2021).

We find this emphasis on place to be of great relevance to our teaching practice, and to the transportive activities of environmental communication educators who move students to new places of knowing. Place informs how and why we teach, and the ways in which we engage with disciplinary knowledge. Connectedness to place is also deeply important for students and can enhance their sense of belonging, or the “perception of feeling valued and respected by other students and feeling like a valued part of the university context” (Van Gijn-Grosvenor & Huisman, 2020, p. 377). In a face-to-face learning experience, there is likely to be a shared sense of place in the learning community, as teacher and students gather together in the same location. Online learning, in contrast, sees members of the learning community come virtually together from diverse places. This has led to scholarly ruminations on the displaced and disembodied nature of online learning led by the assumption that online communication is “disconnected from a physical presence” (Delahunty et al., 2014, p. 244). Bayne, for instance, writes of “digital futures” in which “‘place’ and ‘learning community’ lose their material anchor and become virtual and imagined” (2010, pp. 8–9) through online learning. Nevertheless, prior research has shown that establishing a sense of place is vitally important when designing online and blended learning environments (Northcote, 2008; Yu, 2017). As we demonstrate below, in online and blended learning environments “place” refers to both the virtual place in which the learning community meets and the physical place of each member of that community. “Place” can also refer to the sense of identity, community, belonging, and connection an individual feels within the learning community and wider higher education system.

Garrison and co-authors’ “Community of Inquiry” framework (2000) provides a useful tool for understanding how places of learning are constructed and maintained, particularly in the age of online teaching. A community of inquiry is created when a group of individuals, including teachers and students – “the key participants in the educational process” (Garrison et al., 2000, p. 88) – come together to collaboratively and critically construct meaning. Such a community is defined by the dynamic interactions between social presence, cognitive presence, and – of particular interest to us – teaching presence. Itself consisting of three components relating to the design, facilitation, and direction of social and cognitive processes (Garrison & Arbaugh, 2007), the concept of “teaching presence” has been an important tool for our own reflections because it recognises the role of the educator in transporting students to “personally meaningful and educationally worthwhile learning outcomes” (163). Other scholars concur that teaching presence is a vital component of a successful learning community. Stone and Springer argue that “engaging and interactive course design” should be seen in combination with “strong and engaging teacher-presence” especially when it comes to enhancing the online student experience (2019, p. 150). Similarly, the teacher’s absence can have a profound effect on learners. For online students in particular, the problem of the non-responsive or “disappearing” lecturer can lead to a lack of engagement (O’ Shea et al., 2015, pp. 48–49).

In taking “ownership” of the community of inquiry model and applying it within our discipline (Quinnell et al., 2010, p. 21; Higgs, 2016, p. 189), we interpret “teaching presence” as an emplaced and embodied presence. To elucidate this further, we identify and explore a set of core commitments to practice for environmental communication educators. We have identified these commitments within our own practices and take up this opportunity in the present article to weave them together as a framework that will continue to guide our teaching as we move both back into the classroom (after the pandemic) and forward into digitised and hybrid learning futures:

1. Be respectful of place in our teaching, and encourage student reflection on the emplaced nature of learning (even, and especially, when the learning is online).

2. Tell stories of individual, emplaced, local action.

3. Encourage interaction between students, with experts in the field, and with the more-than-human world.

4. Encourage diverse ways of learning and knowing, and open multiple pathways to participation.

5. Design learning environments with intentionality, and allow movement between learning environments.

6. Emplace ourselves: bring our own stories, experiences, and sense of place into our teaching, and acknowledge both our physical and our reflexive place (in other words, we should not efface our own standpoint in relation to environmental issues).

7. Empower and emplace students as co-teachers.

Below, we reflect on the application of these core commitments in three examples of our own teaching practice. We have deliberately chosen three distinct modes of teaching: a located experience involving in-person experiential field learning, a fully online experience with a large and diverse cohort, and an emplaced face-to-face experience that shifted to emergency remote instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic. In what follows, we study these pedagogical experiences to examine place in relation to environmental communication educators and instruction in an increasingly – by force or choice – online world. We begin, though, with an example of an environmental communication course that relied neither upon traditional classroom experiences or virtual learning environments, but with a physical experience of outdoor place shared by teacher and students.

Communication for change – teaching in the forest

The Styx Valley, in the deeply forested south of Australia’s southern island, Tasmania, is home to some of the tallest flowering plants on Earth. These ancient forests of Eucalyptus regnans – giant ash – are the places of more-than-500-year-old trees towering more than 90 meters tall, some with 20 m girths. Such moss-shrouded forests, with understories of primeval giant tree ferns, are among the planet’s most carbon-dense ecosystems. The Styx forests have also been a flashpoint of Tasmania’s long running “Forest Wars,” a bitter 40-year conflict over industrial forestry in Tasmania (Lester & Hutchins, 2012) that was (partly) ended with a “Forest Peace Deal” in 2013 (Schirmer et al., 2016), when 172,000 hectares of Tasmanian forest were added to the UNESCO Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area. For decades, the forestry debate has been hugely divisive, leading many Tasmanians to develop an identity-defining “empathetic ecocultural positionality” (Banham, 2020) in relation to the forests and their felling. Activists from a range of pro-environmental groups have been instrumental in achieving a reduction in forestry industry activities. However, felling of old-growth forest, high temperature burning, and replanting with single species plantations still occurs in portions of the Styx Valley and other “working forests” in Tasmania, with forests seeing bulldozers, police roadblocks, activist banners, and arrests. These forests have also seen mediatised environmental conflict (Hutchins & Lester, 2015) unfold over decades; however, the forests may not previously have been used as an immersive university classroom for studying environmental communication.

In 2019, a globally recognised center of environmental communication research at an Australian university offered a graduate course called Communication for Change. The course investigated strategic, NGO, and activist communication to affect environmental and social change and was an intensive face-to-face learning experience, both in the classroom and on several field trips, including in the Styx Valley. With just eleven students enrolled, this course was well suited to the kind of experiential learning that scholarship has shown can influence environmental attitudes and promote pro-environmental behavior (Ballantyne & Packer, 2009; Duerden & Witt, 2010). To that end, the instructor transported the students into the forest to immerse with an environmental communicator, a 30-year campaign veteran from The Wilderness Society, an organisation whose activism and advocacy have been instrumental in protecting parts of the Styx Valley and other forests in Tasmania. Students visited locations in the forests that had been sites of some of the most successful protest actions that saved parts of the valley from logging (see Figures 1 and 2). Standing at the foot of an 84-meter-tall Eucalyptus regnans named Gandalf’s Staff, students heard how, during the “Forest Wars,” a collaboration between Greenpeace and The Wilderness Society had a series of platforms perched in the tree, where Australian and international activists lived aloft and sent images, interviews, and video material around the world to draw attention to the continued logging of these old growth forests. The veteran campaigner described bringing politicians to the area, formulating messages for the media, and undertaking direct actions. Students gained insight, in situ, into the strategic “tap dance” (Castells, 2004, p. 168) of move and countermove at the heart of the symbiotic relationship among media and the reconfigurative power of protest communication (Milstein et al., 2020).

Figure 1. Hearing from veteran forest activist Geoff Law (photo by Gabi Mocatta).

Figure 2. Experiential learning – forest immersion (photo by Gabi Mocatta).

Back in the classroom, and in response to their forest immersion, students undertook praxis-based environmental communication learning and assessment (Endres et al., 2008). For example, they were asked to create possible solutions for a live environmental communication problem or issue faced by an organisation, responding with a piece of real-world strategic communications work that could be used by organisations. Students were asked to draw on their learning on “what works” in strategic communication of environmental issues they heard about, felt, saw, experienced, and had come to more deeply understand in the forests of the Styx Valley. In further practicing transportive learning – moving from embodied experience of place to change-making action – at least one student shared their work with the organisation they were hypothetically writing for in the assignment, and the student’s ideas were taken up by the organisation, resulting in real-world change.

This teaching experience represents a model that we all find attractive and meaningful, not just because of its experiential dimensions, but because it forges connections among students, practitioners, and the more-than-human world (a key transportive strategy). It also results in interesting variations on the traditional place of the teacher. In the outdoor environmental communication classroom, the instructor does not need to actively lecture to students, but rather plays the transportive role of facilitating such embodied and applied experiences, leading students in observing, questioning, listening, conversing, and traversing. The teacher’s role, in this instance, was also to make space within the learning for emotional responses. Some students in the course had not previously experienced, in an immersive multi-sensory way, remote old-growth forests containing centuries-old trees. They found the experience awe-inspiring. Others were emotionally struck by the industry-cleared sections of forest they encountered, where the logging industry had rendered those same kinds of ancient trees to vast stumps amid broken giant tree ferns and blackened, burned forest remains (see Figure 3). Such experiences allowed students to develop their own attitudes – not just cognitively, but through a visceral shift in their knowing – and to find their own “empathetic ecocultural positionality” (Banham, 2020). Emotions are crucial to the success of environmental education, as prior studies have shown (Goralnik et al., 2012; Ries & Roth 2009), and experiential study often has such affective learning at its core. Experiential learning techniques allow for students’ insights to be deepened, as Johnson and Frederickson (2000: 45) put it, by “enlisting experience and emotion as allies in the process of understanding.”

Figure 3. A student surveys a logging coupe in the Styx Valley (photo by Gabi Mocatta).

Such affective educational design is most easily and obviously offered by situated learning in non-formal settings and in (outdoor) place. However, as we shall see below, while online learning experiences may seem antithetical to affective (or even effective) pedagogy, the movement of students between diverse online and offline places, when transportively facilitated by the teacher, can evoke strong connections to environmental communication knowledge. It is also worth noting that in-the-field teaching, of necessity, is often confined to small numbers – and often with short forays into placed-based learning within a broader blended experience. We turn next to a very different pedagogical modality – large student numbers and online asynchronous learning – and unpack the place of the environmental communication instructor in this contrasting context.

Sustainability literacy – everyday practices, online spaces

Our second example is a fully online environmental communication course that introduced students at a regional Australian university to the concept of sustainability literacy, best defined as “the knowledge, skills and mindsets that allow individuals to become deeply committed to building a sustainable future and assisting in making informed and effective decisions to this end” (United Nations, 2018). Students were invited to apply the concept of sustainability literacy both to their own lives and to the broader world, with the ultimate goal being to help them identify, understand, and mobilise their “sustainable selves” (Murray, 2011, p. 217). More broadly, students were invited to develop and activate their capacity for critical reflection as a means of “learning through and from experience towards gaining new insights of self,” and, in particular, “examining assumptions of everyday practice” (Finlay, 2008, p. 1). Aligning with the transportive model, these reflections also led to connections between learners’ own individual values and their place in the world. Reflective practice was here an emplacing process designed to strengthen students’ connections to their local and global communities and to the biosphere itself.

The teaching team used online tools to help students make connections between a conceptualisation of sustainability and their own lived experience. In this way, the boundaries of the learning environment extended beyond the virtual classroom. Learning activities were designed to be undertaken while students were immersed in everyday life, with an emphasis on place, lived experience, and personal practices. In a week on sustainability and food, for example, students were invited to pick a favorite recipe and investigate the origin of each ingredient (with a spirit of curiosity rather than criticism). They shared findings in communal online discussion spaces, and reciprocal rather than transmissive communication was encouraged, with students building on ideas proffered by others. Online teaching tools – discussion boards, short video lectures, and interactive learning material – were also used as prompts to help students engage with the “natural” world. For example, students were invited to create their own “biodiversity soundscape” by stepping outside with a recording device (such as their smartphone) and capturing a short audio recording that could later be listened to for evidence of biodiversity levels. In this way, online prompts and lesson plans were used as transportive tools leading to learning at the intersection of technology, embodied experience, and ecological places.

The learning environment of this online course relied heavily on the “social presence” component of the community of inquiry model, particularly because we made frequent use of online discussion boards as learning tools. However, “teaching presence” was also essential. Garrison and colleagues argue that social interactions by themselves are insufficient to ensure effective learning; these interactions “need to have clearly defined parameters and be focused in a specific direction” (2007, p. 163). In other words, students may find it difficult to transport themselves toward meaningful learning outcomes, even when learning is lively, discussion-based, and student-led. We found, for example, that the presence of teaching team members was crucial in overcoming initial student worries about the impersonal nature of online learning. The asynchronous online learning platform of this course catered to the large, geographically dispersed nature of the student cohort, which incorporated learners from across Australia, including many in remote and regional areas. It was quickly apparent that this online cohort yearned for a sense of emplacement and community – for connection with like-minded individuals, but also for healthy debate about the issues that mattered to them. Some students entered the learning community with perceptions that online study was a mediated experience that could never match the embodied immediacy of in-person learning. The teaching team’s response to this early dilemma was to use online discussions as a tool for forging connections between students as well as ideas, collapsing the sense of distance between learners while also honouring the uniqueness of each learner’s emplaced experience. We strove here to turn impersonal online “spaces” into valuable “places” of learning.

It was particularly important for the teaching team to teach from an emplaced position – that is, to share details about their connection to place, their embodied and lived experiences, and their stories in order to transcend their status as disembodied authoritative voices on recorded lectures. It became apparent that without this building of teacher place and presence, the teachers themselves would disappear into the learning material. The teacher’s place in this online course therefore encompassed the real places in which the teaching team members were embedded as well as each teacher’s capacity to map pathways between disciplinary knowledge, lived experience, and real-world environmental issues. This sharing of place-stories, in turn, enhanced social presence and improved the ability of participants “to project their personal characteristics into the community, thereby presenting themselves to the other participants as ‘real people’” (Garrison et al., 2000, p. 89). With this in mind, students were encouraged to use their first discussion board post to describe where they were learning (and communicating) from. Led by the example of the teaching team, some students offered an Acknowledgement of Country in their introductory post. Used at events, gatherings, and ceremonies across Australia, an Acknowledgement of Country is a statement that shows respect for the traditional First Nations custodians of the land(s) on which participants are meeting. In this case, the Acknowledgement of Country became a powerful way to pay respect to Indigenous cultures and to gain a sense of the geographic diversity within the shared learning community. Students also expressed fondness for their places and offered short descriptions of embodied, emplaced activities like walking the dog or strolling on the beach. Some formed connections with others through shared experience in a particular place – for example, students would form study groups with those in their same local area. At times, these local connections were built upon moments of real-world environmental action: in particular, the climate strikes of 2019, which took place in various localities across Australia, gave students an opportunity to connect with other members of the learning community who shared a physical connection to a local place as well as an emotional connection to a global issue.

These reflections illuminate aspects of the transportive model as they might apply to online learning. In particular, reflecting on this course reminds us that places both inside and outside the learning environment are important; as well as sharing their own connection to place, the teacher can transportively guide students as they move between, and in and out of, places of learning. Like communication itself, then, teaching this course was an emplacing and emplaced practice – the teaching team made visible their own stories of place, while also constructing the places of learning through their design, delivery, and interactions with students. This enabled students to share and acknowledge their own “realness” and to connect with the concept of sustainability because (not in spite) of their own backgrounds, experiences, locations, and everyday lives.

Re-placing experiential learning during the pandemic

Our third example is an undergraduate course on environmental activism and change-making, co-designed and co-taught by an environmental communication scholar and a cultural geographer. This typically in-person course is part of an Environmental Humanities major at a major state university in Australia’s largest urban center, Sydney. Taught as a face-to-face large lecture with weekly breakout sections (tutorials), the course has an environmental communication focus and ecocultural and political economic orientations. Combined, the instructors have taught in universities for nearly five decades in several countries, but in 2020 both were new to teaching this particular course and neither had ever taught online nor had harbored plans to do so. Due to pandemic restrictions in 2020, they had to quickly reorient their own notion of their place as educators and consider how to teach environmental change-making in transportive and transformative ways online.

Facing all courses suddenly moving online due to the pandemic and Australia closing its international borders, the instructors needed to determine ways of moving students to engaged interaction using online tools and encouraging members of the learning community to learn from one another’s emplacement (with teachers, students, and guest speakers located – and often stuck – in diverse international places). This involved both replacing and re-placing experiential learning with online equivalents. Live synchronous online delivery was used to create ample opportunity for engagement among learners and teachers. Weekly feature-length environmental documentaries were shown, paired with each week’s theme, to approximate experiential learning. To empower students as co-teachers, meanwhile – a key component of our transportive model – students gathered in an online forum to post their parallel open-ended weekly documentary discussion questions, which required application and engagement of course concepts to the places and issues of focus in the films. Students received instructor feedback every week until nearly every student was crafting probing, concept-driven questions. Further, weekly tutorial discussions were organised around the most effective of these student questions, further emplacing students as co-teachers. Students commented that the process of watching documentaries at home under pandemic lockdowns also engaged their families or housemates, and, expanding the reach of co-teaching, gave students an opportunity to teach their familiars about course concepts related to their ideologies and opinions, allowing them to engage and spread key environmental communication concepts beyond the confines of the course itself. Moreover, the physical distance of these online learning experiences was counterbalanced by the shared embodied urgency of the pandemic, which in a sense had everyone sharing a profound comprehension of emplaced interconnection. In this way, the pandemic itself, as environmental communication co-teacher, provided an ongoing frame for course content.

Like educators across the world in 2020, the teachers of this course quickly and unexpectedly found themselves engaging with students in virtual rather than physical classrooms. In this case, Blackboard Collaborate – an online teaching platform with affordances similar to Zoom – provided a useful transportive tool to emplace teacher and students in one visible shared plain. The teachers soon discovered that the benefits of this tool included the capacity for simultaneous writing and viewing (via digital chats and whiteboards), allowing a wide range of voices and ideas to be heard reflexively at once. International students, meanwhile, offered emplaced perspectives as they experienced different home country environments through an ecologically implicating pandemic.

Yet this transportive experience was also, at times, a somewhat bumpy road. One of the strengths of transportive pedagogy is its creation of inclusive and responsive learning communities wherein education leads to personal and collective growth. The shared physical space of a classroom is particularly conducive to such inclusivity and responsivity. Here, though, the educators found that a lack of engagement by a large number of online students – who were able to “check out” of learning in ways not possible if they had been face-to-face in a classroom – hindered these transportive connections. A portion of the class, for example, chose to keep their cameras and microphones turned off, and rarely participated in synchronous discussions (an issue we see continuing into the present in hybrid or online classrooms). From our perspective as educators struggling to place ourselves in a new and unfamiliar landscape of learning, these students did not “get on the bus” at all, and the teachers’ power to transport them seemed to largely disappear.

Upon reflection, this lack of engagement “problem” was more multifaceted and complex than the educators, at the time, understood it to be. Video telephony tools like Blackboard Collaborate and Zoom have been shown to have their own “hidden curriculum” involving unwritten rules and expectations that are often not openly communicated to members of the learning community (Hogan & Sathy, 2020). Learning in this format involves power relations and the normalising of power-informed ways of looking. As Caines has pointed out, video telephony “shifts the nature of the relationship between viewing and being viewed, [and] it also shifts our awareness of it: It makes us more conscious of how visibility is mediated by technologies in general” (2020). When used as an online classroom, Zoom and Blackboard Collaborate are less “places” and more mediating forces that call our attention to “the gaze” and to “the power relations in looking and being seen,” and can increase alienation by “defaulting to and normalizing a kind of self-surveillance” (Caines 2020). All three of us have experienced these complexities, and indeed become more adept at managing them, in the years since 2020. We find here a powerful reminder that online education tools can enable transportive teaching (by creating a space within which learners can gather) but also hinder it (by weakening connections between teacher and learners). In hindsight, and as we are seeing in our current teaching practices (as our use of online tools becomes more nuanced), intentionality is the key to effective use of online tools, including digital classrooms; and when it comes specifically to digital classrooms, a recognition of the multiple places from which individuals are joining the community of inquiry – rather than a reliance on one specific fabricated and virtual “place” – may enable a richer learning experience, regardless of whether learners are “seen” and “heard” by others.

Conclusion and discussion

The teacher’s place in environmental communication – and higher education at large – is multifaceted, even fragmented. It involves learning design, facilitation of discussion, pastoral care, and administration. During the pandemic, our teaching places became more diverse and we were not always in control of where our teaching was placed. In the present review, we have proposed a transportive model for understanding the place of the teacher in environmental communication pedagogy, in which educators guide students toward new positions of knowledge, awareness, and capability to act. Transportive teaching contrasts with transmissive teaching: the teacher is not the gatekeeper or conveyor of knowledge but the creator of experiences, and students are participants in the learning process rather than recipients of information. The transportive model is also one that takes account of the teacher’s place within the learning environment while acknowledging the teacher’s role in guiding the movement of the learner through various places and experiences, connecting disparate places and creating virtual ones. As we are challenged to teach in different ways, we should not think about the teacher as having no place, but neither should we think of the teacher’s place as fixed – as only in the field or in the classroom. As the teacher moves between learning experiences, the story of their place becomes richer and stronger, as does their capacity to transport students to a place of deeper understanding.

In explicating this model and the way it has guided our own teaching, we have identified a set of core commitments to practice, each of which stems from the teacher’s place and presence, and which we reiterate and flesh out here:

1. Be respectful of place in our teaching, and encourage student reflection on the emplaced nature of learning (even, and especially, when the learning is online).

Foreground and acknowledge emplaced experiences, including those that are shared (in the classroom – whether the classroom is a forest or a room on campus) and those that are disparate (the various emplaced environments from which online learners learn). Use embodied and emplaced experiences as the impetus for change-making action. When places of learning are disparate, recognise the shared nature of Earthly place.

2. Tell stories of individual, emplaced, local action.

Design learning activities that are embedded in everyday life and local communities. When it is possible to do so, bring practitioners (including activists) into the classroom, or re-arrange classroom walls to incorporate real-world communication practice.

3. Encourage interaction between students, with experts in the field, and with the more-than-human world.

Such encounters may be synchronous and shared, but when we cannot physically drive a busload of students into the depths of wild nature, we can still transport them through well-designed activities that encourage movement from traditional to non-traditional places of learning.

4. Encourage diverse ways of learning and knowing, and open multiple pathways to participation.

Recognise our own biases about online learning and, equally, recognise the multiple forms that student engagement can take. In an online classroom, do not assume that “good” engagement involves video and audio participation. Create opportunities for asynchronous as well as synchronous participation and use our place as teachers to ensure all members of the learning community feel valued regardless of how they display their engagement as students.

5. Design learning environments with intentionality, and allow movement between learning environments.

Reflect on each decision we make as teachers, including the decision to use particular tools. Do not assume that technologies of the screen are a hindrance to outdoor experiences; recognise that mobile media devices, when used intentionally as part of teaching, can prompt students to take learning outside.

6. Emplace ourselves: bring our own stories, experiences, and sense of place into our teaching, and acknowledge both our physical and our reflexive place.

Share stories that emphasise, rather than hide, our grounding in place and our own emotional responses to place, and do not efface our own standpoint in relation to environmental issues.

7. Empower and emplace students as co-teachers.

Make productive use of online technologies and tools, such as digital discussion boards and whiteboards, to encourage students to participate in the practice of teaching as well as learning. It can be helpful to encourage peer-to-peer discussion and collaboration, where the teacher’s place is amongst, but not between, students (an instigator and joiner of conversations, but not the gatekeeper of them). Provide ample opportunities for students to teach others: in their communities, their families, their workplaces, and/or to pass their learnings on to real-world stakeholders (such as NGOs).

These commitments have been solidified through reflection on three distinct modes of teaching, but they are applicable to teaching practice across all modalities. For example, facilitating interaction between students and the more-than-human world may involve driving students to the forest but it can also involve encouraging online learners to step into their outdoor environments. And while physical classrooms are conducive to deep engagement in a shared grounded place, online learning environments can allow for emplaced learning where students and teachers are connected with each other and also, individually, with their own places. We are reminded of times in the thick of the pandemic where we would teach from home, or from our gardens, even our local communities, with the sounds of local wildlife – and/or our own children! – leaving an imprint on our teaching practice. There are strengths to be found in this emplaced mode of teaching, especially when the tools used to create and maintain them are used with intentionality. In this sense, we take away from the emergency remote learning period a critical insight: teachers must be given the time to develop learning environments thoughtfully and in a way that is attentive to the learning material so their capacity to help transport students to meaningful learning outcomes is not diminished and in some ways is potentially enhanced.

A more developed understanding of the multiple places of the teacher will strengthen our discipline and enable us to continue to teach in a (some day) post-pandemic world in ways that achieve the desired outcomes of environmental communication pedagogy: to empower students as change-makers and problem-solvers in response to environmental crises. This, in turn, is something our discipline can offer others. Nevertheless, there are multiple threats to the place of the teacher in higher education: the automation of aspects of teaching; the need for courses to be passed from teacher to teacher, and for content to be anonymised to facilitate this; the reduction of time to design and deliver courses. We argue that in the face of such developments, the value of the teacher’s place cannot be lost; indeed, where possible, it must be maintained, with the support of institutions. Our reflections above have shown that a teacher’s role in face-to-face, experiential, online, or blended learning is not simply to design learning experiences and deliver them to students; nor is it merely to “get the technology right” (a way of thinking that erases the teacher’s place or devalues it in the face of technological concerns). The instructor’s role is to engage in a form of place-making that has meaningful outcomes for students. In other words, we do not just drive the bus: we map the terrain, and we guide and engage with students as they embark and throughout the journey. We activate their thinking about the multiple destinations and origins – the many places – that form our movements through this emplaced field of knowledge. In doing so, we enable our students to be effective, ethical, and even transformative environmental communicators.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).