Radically Hopeful: Climate-Conscious Pedagogy for Marketing Educators

This commentary addresses the urgent need for marketing educators to integrate climate change education (CCE) into their curricula through transformative pedagogical approaches. Marketing's traditional growth-oriented focus perpetuates overconsumption and environmental degradation, positioning the discipline as both complicit in and potentially instrumental to addressing the climate crisis. The paper introduces "climate-conscious pedagogy"—an educational framework that transcends deficit-based climate discourse through ethics of care and pedagogies of hope. The proposed three-fold framework encompasses: (1) fostering awareness by making climate connections visible in marketing contexts, (2) centering students by addressing climate-related emotions through supportive pedagogies of care, and (3) building resilience by empowering students through hope-centered action and agency development. Pedagogies of care emphasize relationality and challenge dominant capitalist logics, while pedagogies of hope focus on future visioning, solution-oriented thinking, and community building. The commentary provides practical guidance for marketing educators, including course-specific integration strategies and learning outcomes for climate-conscious pedagogy. By positioning marketing educators as systems change agents, this work offers a pathway for transforming marketing education to prepare practitioners who can address environmental externalities while fostering human and planetary flourishing.