Deadline: December 1, 2026

We invite contributions to a forthcoming anthology from Intellect Books. Climate in the Classroom: Reimagining Communication, Media and Journalism Pedagogy will be the first book to propose practical and theoretically rich ways for communication and media instructors to teach about climate and environment. 

While climate change affects us all, teaching which addresses it remains only sparsely scattered through the media, journalism, and communications curricula. In contrast to the thorough embedding of AI and digital media into communications teaching, climate change and the environment remains a separate silo, not a priority area in students' education. Yet, as students encounter climate change and the environmental impacts of communications infrastructure like data centres in their daily lives, they increasingly call on educators to address it (Thew et al 2021; SOS/NUS, n.d.).  

Environmentally engaged media studies calls for a radical reorientation of our curricula (Keilbach & Pabiś-Orzeszyna, 2021). This anthology will provide an accessible guide for instructors who want to fill this gap but might feel unqualified, or who already teach environment and media and are seeking inspiration and community. The book will present commissioned essays from experts around the world who are pioneering the teaching of climate change in the media, journalism, and communications fields. 

We suggest several avenues for this below: 

• Encouraging student interest, empowerment, and engagement 
  
• Teaching the next generation of climate communicators
  
• Challenging the illusion of a “clean” or dematerialised media industry, including in the classroom
  
• Foregrounding climate change as a social fact, not just a scientific one
  
• Actively confronting climate denial, greenwashing, and silencing
  
• Approaching institutionalized resistance to climate teaching
  
• Elevating the expertise and leadership of those who are often sidelined from mainstream climate discourse - including students themselves
  
• Decolonizing climate and environmental pedagogy in media and communication
  
• Practice-based reflections
  
• Theoretical reflections
  
• The place of emotions such as hope, fear, anxiety, and grief in the classroom
  
• Collaborations between researchers and practitioners and other innovative formats

We welcome contributions that would contribute to any of the planned sections below, but please contact us if you wish to address a different topic related to the book’s theme.

• Teaching mediation of the environment
  
• Teaching climate change journalism
  
• Classroom innovation: building determination and agency
  
• Embedding critique of the media industry’s environmental impact
  
• Environmental justice in the curriculum
  
• Teaching through environmental communication practice
  
• Building institutional competence: Navigating obstacles to climate change teaching

If you teach and innovate in this area, please contribute to this book. Please send an abstract of no more than 400 words to Rosalind Donald (rdonald@american.edu) and Chris Paterson (cpaterson@leeds.ac.uk) by December 1 2026. We will notify commissioned authors by January 14, 2027. First drafts of chapters (provisionally 5,000-6,000 words) will be due by March 31, 2027. If your contribution is reliant on the collection of new data, please state how far along you are with that process.