Environmental journalism education beyond the conventional pedagogical approaches: Exploring the scope of experiential learning to train Pakistan’s journalism students

Abstract

Environmental issues are steadily increasing across the world. News media plays a significant role in highlighting environmental problems and facilitating the public debate to foster a healthy environment. The South Asian news media do report on environmental challenges. However, the major focus of news media’s coverage remains politics, economy, regional and international security issues. In the case of Pakistan, the second largest South Asian country, environmental reporting does not rank high among the editorial priorities and the newsroom’s hierarchies across the country. In addition to editorial priority, reporting on environmental issues, in its geopolitical, social, and scientific contexts, requires expert knowledge and the journalists’ ability to frame environmental stories in an effective manner. Therefore, it is important to explore learning approaches that can enhance journalism students’ skills to report on environmental problems effectively. Thus, informed by the theory of experiential learning, this study aims to explore how an experience-based model can help to meet the practical needs of environmental journalism for an improved news media’s coverage of environmental issues in Pakistan. In doing so, this study features the views of Pakistani journalism and media academics that have been gathered through in-depth interviews (online) and analyzes the gathered data thematically.