University of Vermont Environmental Communication and Public Opinion ENVS 195 OL 2 Fall 2012 Instructor: Cara Robechek (
[email protected]) 802-229-5919 Location: Online Textbook: Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere, Third Edition by Robert Cox © 2012. Course Description: This course will explore the field of environmental communication and the ways that environmental information is created, framed, and disseminated in a digital age. Students will practice locating and evaluating information about environmental topics, and then using this information to convey meaning in electronic formats. Topics to be covered include symbolic constructions of the environment, communication about science and risk, use of language in constructing mental models, how media reports on environmental issues, how public opinions are formed, the use of social media and blogs in promoting specific viewpoints about the environment, corporate use of green marketing, and the ability of citizens to communicate their environmental concerns through public forums and environmental justice campaigns. Students will examine the role of peer reviewed journals, journalistic sources, social media, and blogs in environmental communication, and will collaborate to build a wiki about a controversial topic that they have researched in depth.
Course Expectations, Assignments, and Grading: Homework (22% of your grade): Each week there will be a homework assignment that will consist of a reading assignment and some brief questions to help guide your readings, and allow me to assess your comprehension of the material. The questions will mainly be short answer, multiple choice, matching, and true/false. Discussion Forum (21% of your grade): Each week you will be expected to participate in the discussion forum in Blackboard. The discussions will provide a chance to explore the weekly topics in depth. I will post questions related to the readings, as well as links to additional recent articles, websites, and videos for discussion. I will expect you to read, and watch most of these linked resources. What am I looking for with your posts?: I will expect each student to check into the discussion board on at least two separate days per week and to make an absolute minimum of 5 posts each week. Posts should be thoughtful, respectful, and substantive, and students are encouraged to engage in dialogue with one another as well as responding to my questions and prompts. Students who wait until the last day or two of the week to do all of their postings cannot expect to receive top grades for the simple reason that this does not give time for a rich discussion to develop. Similarly postings after the due date will not be counted toward your course grade. Short Written Assignments (32% of your grade): There will be four short (3 page or less) written assignments due during the first 9 weeks of the course. These are briefly described in the Course Schedule below. Each of these will be worth 8% of the course grade. Research Paper and Wiki: (25% of your grade). Students will write a 6-8 page research paper about a controversial environmental topic and how it is communicated in a variety of different online formats. Students will work together in the first weeks of class to create a list of topics and then will have the chance to prioritize which topics they are most interested in writing about. The instructor will assign topics based on students’ preferences. Papers will be due at the end of week 12. In week 13, students who wrote about the same topic will collaborate to create a wiki about their research topic. In week 14 students will review all the wikis created by students researching other controversial topics. All topics will be discussed in detail.
Course Syllabus Note: this syllabus is tentative and will be adapted to reflect changes in the new third edition of the textbook, which has not yet been released (as of April 2012). Weekly Topic 1. Introduction to Environmental communication and to the Evaluation of Web resources
Readings Environmental Communication Chapter 1 “Evaluating Web Pages” Techniques to Apply and Questions to Ask” UC Berkeley Library: http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/Teachin gLib/Guides/Internet/Evaluate.html Environmental Communication Chapter 2
2. Social and Symbolic Constructions of the Watch and discuss: TED talks by Environment Edward Burtynsky, Yann ArthusBertrand, and James Balog 3. Environmental Communications Communicating Chapter 9 Science and Uncertainty
4. Framing: Language and the Construction of Mental models
5. Media coverage of the Environment
Additional Assignments Website assessment Exercise: Analyze four different websites about the same topic using the criteria from the UC Berkeley tutorial.
Peer reviewed journal Analysis: Choose a peer reviewed journal that publishes environmental articles. Research the organization that publishes the journal. What are the stated aims and scope of the journal? Who are their main editors? What is their peer review policy? What information do they provide for authors and potential authors?
Lakoff, George: “Why it Matters How we Frame the Environment” Environmental Communication © 2010. Volume 4, Issue 1. Foust and Murphy “Revealing and Reframing Apocalyptic Tragedy in Global Warming Discourse” Environmental Communication Vol 3 No 2 July 2009 pp 151-167. Boykoff: “We Speak for the Trees: Media Reporting on the Environment”. The Annual Review
News Media Comparison: Choose an environmental issue currently in the news. Using an online search
of Environment and Resources 2009, 34:431-57 Boykoff and Boykoff: Climate Change and Journalistic Norms: A case-study of US mass-media coverage. Geoforum 2007
6. New Media and the Environment
7. Risk Communication
8. Public opinion and environmental Controversy
9. Social media and Environmental Advocacy
engine, find two different news sources that report on the issue in very different ways. The differences might be based on, scale (Burlington Free Press vs USA Today), national or regional affiliation (BBC News vs Al Jazera) or political leaning (Fox News vs NPR). In what ways are the presentations of the issue different between the two articles?
Environmental Communication Chapter 5 O’Neill, S.J. and M. Boykoff, 2011. The role of new media in engaging the public with climate change. In L. Whitmarsh, S.J. O’Neill, and I. Lorenzoni (Ed.), Engaging the Public with Climate Change: Communication and Behaviour Change Chapter 13, Earthscan, London. Environmental communication chapter 6 Leiserowitz, A. (2006) Climate change risk perception and policy preferences: The role of affect, imagery, and values. Climatic Change, 77, 45-72. Global Warming’s Six Americas 2009: An Audience Segmentation Analysis http://environment.yale.edu/uploads/ SixAmericas2009.pdf Additional readings from the Global Warming’s Six Americas research project. Environmental Communications Chapter 7 D. S. Bortree and T. Seltzer “Dialogic strategies and outcomes: An analysis of environmental
Climate Blogs Analysis: Find at least 2 blogs produced by climate change “alarmists” and 2 produced by climate change “deniers”. How do the blogs use linguistic frames, science and risk to communicate their message? Or Environmental Advocacy through Social Media Assignment: Select three environmental groups of your choice that have a presence on Facebook or another social
advocacy groups’ Facebook profiles”, Public Relations Review Volume 35, Issue 3, September 2009, Pages 317-319.
10. Green Marketing and Corporate Advocacy
11. Citizen Voices and Public Forums 12. Voices for change and Environmental Justice 13 and 14. Student Project and discussion.
networking site. Compare their use of symbols, language, persuasion, and risk communication, in a social media environment. Analyze which demographics from the Six Americas study the facebook campaign is targeting and how effective it is in conveying its message to these groups.
Environmental Communication chapter 10 Ihlen, “Business and Climate Change: the climate Response of the World’s 30 Largest Corporations” Environmental Communication, Vol 3, Issue 2. P 244-262 Environmental Communication Chapters 3 and 4
Environmental Communication Chapter 8
Research Papers due at the end of this week.
Create a wiki with other students who researched the same topic for their papers. During Week 13 students will focus on the topic they researched. In Week 14, students will work on the wikis for all topics. The topics will also be discussed in depth in the discussion boards.
Course Policies: Plagiarism: All work, including formal papers, homework assignments and discussion forum posts must be answered in your own words. Any borrowed language must be presented in quotation marks and cited appropriately. No credit will be given for work that appears to be plagiarized. Late work: Homework assignments and short written assignments will lose 1% off their grade for each day they are late up to a total of 25% off the grade (assignments more than 25 days late
will only lose 25% provided they are turned in before the last day of class). Discussion posts and the final research paper cannot be turned in late. Attendance: Students are expected to attend class each week. Attendance is defined as being present in the discussion board at least once during the week. Students that miss more than 3 classes are unlikely to pass the class.
