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.