Professor of Communication and Media and Program in the Environment
Spotlight on COMM 413: Environmental Communication
With an undergraduate degree in Environmental Policy, Analysis, and Planning from UC Davis, Professor Sol Hart’s passion for policy and legislative writing determined his initial path after college. During his first experience working in politics in California, in an unsuccessful fight to pass a bill requiring proactive inspections for home lead poisoning, Professor Hart developed an interest in “how you actually put those policies into place, not just what policies are effective or not.” Before attending graduate school, he completed an internship with the Sierra Nevada Alliance doing community outreach and community-based marketing. Hart obtained his master’s degree in Environmental Studies from the University of Oregon, exploring disciplines outside his major, including psychology and journalism. At the same time, he assisted with research at a think tank called Decision Research, and he worked on topics including decision-making, public outreach, health communication, and decision-making around health issues.
The thread between this research and his master’s degree topic was the study of how people respond to threats: “I got really interested in that process and in when you have these big issues – climate change is one of them – and when people aren’t rational actors, they tend to respond less to it than maybe ostensibly they should be responding,” he explains. Professor Hart’s interest in communications continued to grow, and he attended Cornell University for his PhD in Communication. At Cornell, he worked with researchers in both the Department of Communication and the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment to study how best to communicate about environmental and risk issues in the public sphere. That work intensified his fascination in learning about what those in judgment decision-making call dread risks – “risks that you feel like you can’t control, that can cause harm to you” – and how disproportionate attention is dedicated to certain topics over others. After completing his doctorate, Hart spent three years at American University’s School of Communication and gained valuable experiences through work with nonprofits and policymakers in Washington DC at the same time. By the time he began working at the University of Michigan in 2013, he defined the scope of his research as “communicating science, health, environment, and risk,” or ComSHER.
Here at U-M, Professor Hart is a Professor of both Communication & Media and the Program in the Environment. He developed his class COMM/ENVIRON 413: Environmental Communication in 2013, and while there were faculty teaching classes on environmental sociology and psychology, COMM 413 was the first class “focusing on how to communicate effectively about environmental issues.” The course puts Hart in the unique position of teaching students who, while enrolled in a 400-level class, have limited experience in one of the two disciplines the class covers. The Program in the Environment (PitE) students come in with little to no experience in communication, and the communication majors don’t have as much of an environmental background. Keeping this in mind, Hart splits the course into halves. The first half is “a really broad overview of environmental communication and the environmental movement.” Beginning with ideas of romanticism, preservation, and conservation, the students learn about Henry David Thoreau, the Hetch Hetchy controversy, and other historical environmental controversies. Next, the class covers the modern environmental movement, beginning in the 1960s, and the ideas of environmental justice and global sustainability that have become more prevalent in recent years. Finally, Hart has students think through the portrayals of the environment and animals in film and media, the accompanying emotional responses, and the concepts of judgment and rational vs. irrational decision-making as applied to environmental issues.
The second half of the course is dedicated to introducing foundational communication strategies and applying this knowledge in a final project. In this section, Professor Hart begins by covering fundamentals like using efficacy and threat, framing the environment to contextualize it for the public, fighting misinformation, using visual communication, normative appeals, the best ways to highlight the work of others, and avoiding the boomerang or backfire effects (creating the opposite effect of what was intended). At this point, Hart assigns them a final project to apply these concepts to a real use case. For the past four or five years, he has asked students to find an organizational website that covers an environmental issue and use everything they learned in class to revise the website for more effective communication: students are instructed to consider questions like, “Are they highlighting threat and efficacy effectively? If not, how would I change this website?” They create a proposal for an improved version of the website, accompanied by a write-up explaining their choices; Hart shares that students go on to use this project in their portfolios as they apply for jobs and internships in strategic communication, directly utilizing COMM 413 in their professional lives.
Another way that Professor Hart teaches students to connect the classroom to the real world is through improvisation and creative exercises. This has been the biggest change in how he teaches COMM 413, inspired by his attendance at a conference by the Applied Improvisation Network (AIN) and the Alan Alda Center in 2019. Up to that point, COMM 413 had been conducted in a much more traditional seminar format. However, with a class size of 20-25 students, Hart increasingly sought to bring in more active learning and creative exercises into the classroom: he thought, “It would be just really fun to try and integrate these kinds of exercises into teaching and to see whether I could do that.” Generally, these activities follow the structure of introducing class material, exploring some relevant facets of the human experience through improv, and debriefing afterward.
For example, an issue that Professor Hart covers in COMM 413 is the imbalance of status in public meetings, where scientific experts, perceived to have a higher status, don’t facilitate participation with the public and instead simply announce decisions without back-and-forth. After covering this topic in class, Hart chooses an improv game about status to conduct with the students. As one example, he breaks students into groups of five, assigns them roles (like a scientist or “concerned soccer mom”), has them conduct mock public meetings, and regularly switches up the status of different roles. “So if you’re a scientist, you might start high status, and if you’re the public, you’re low status. And then we’ll swap that, or have everyone be high or low status,” he explains. After the exercises, which take about 20 to 25 minutes, they reconvene to debrief. After this particular activity, students acknowledged the issues with scientists having higher status than the public, but they felt more uncomfortable when scientists were of low status, because “they’re the experts, and if they aren’t taking that high expert status, the conversation doesn’t move forward.” These activities are highly experiential and offer insights that are difficult to grasp through textbooks or lectures alone. Any instructors interested in learning more about how Professor Hart utilizes creative exercises and improv in his teaching are encouraged to attend his workshop on the topic with CRLT this November.
There are several key skills that Professor Hart hopes his students take away from the class and implement into their daily lives. Of course, all of the strategic communication tools taught in the second section of the class are key for students if they go on to science communication roles in their future careers. But Hart also views COMM 413 as a chance for students to become more successful interpersonal communicators about environmental issues like climate change and he is adamant about not glossing over the challenging nature of talking to skeptics, in particular. “For many people, [climate denial] is tied in with their personal and political identity…we can still think through the effective communication strategies that we can use.” Additionally, he works to equip his students with the ability to navigate the complex ways that media portrayals of the environment “affect our understanding of the environment, and how those interactions shape our world and how we move through life.” Finally, he always wants his class to be a fun, engaging learning environment that students look forward to, remarking that “if all of that happens, I’m pretty happy.”
As he reflects on his time spent studying, researching, and teaching environmental and science communication, Hart has two pieces of advice to share with other instructors who are interested in including sustainability in their teaching. First, he points out that the diversity of students’ backgrounds, from their political leanings to hometowns, is a strength that instructors should recognize and utilize in the classroom. At the same time, topics like climate change, which different people experience very differently, can bring up emotional responses for students. In light of this, Hart recommends “developing teaching and pedagogical approaches that allow students to make sense of the material in the context of their own lives, lived experience, and perspectives.” Additionally, Hart notices that one of those major emotions students are feeling is climate anxiety, and he believes that educators have a responsibility to, “even amid really severe and strong environmental challenges, think about ways to acknowledge but also address that the anxiety is real, and I think justified. Ensure that it doesn’t drift into a passive pessimism, but can still be affiliated with hope for change and action.”
Along with COMM 413, Professor Hart will also be teaching COMM 102: Media Processes and Effects in Fall 2024.
As a part of the Year of Sustainability, we are interested in sharing, uplifting, and highlighting stories about the people who make up LSA and have experience teaching about sustainability. We sat down with a series of LSA faculty to discuss their background and courses and will feature these conversations in our Faculty Spotlight series.
To contact the LSA Year of Sustainability Team, please contact sustainable-lsa@umich.edu.
