On the Margins, No More: Teaching and Learning as a Core Concern of Disaster Scholarship

This paper introduces two special issues of the International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters focused on teaching and learning. Though there is much recent literature on teaching from other fields, the hazards and disasters community has produced little written scholarship on pedagogy and on curriculum design. To address this gap, we produced a call for papers for a special issue and received many submissions. In this paper, we introduce the need for more scholarship on teaching and learning on the hazards and disaster field. This includes classroom exercises, experiential learning activities, servicelearning and citizen science approaches, and explorations of curricular design. We also introduce the papers that make up the two special issues. The first issue focuses on “Innovative Teaching Techniques and Practices in Hazards and Disaster Studies” and the second on “Curricular Innovations in Hazards and Disaster Studies.” We hope that the papers contained in these two special issues will creat a sustained dialogue on best practices in teaching about hazards and disasters.