Are we being sustainable about sustainability?

Are we being sustainable about sustainability?

Concerns

My first concern is the extent to which educational policymakers appreciate the rationale behind embedding sustainability into ELT, specifically, and whether it is getting into curricula and thus classes in a ‘top-down’ manner. UNESCO (2021) reported that only 53 per cent of the world’s national education curricula make any reference to climate change, and when the subject is mentioned, it is almost always given very low priority. This work will be around sustainability issues being taught in the learners’ first languages. We need data around how many countries have sustainability themes embedded into their ELT national curricula. The second concern is about whether our approach to sustainability is actually sustainable. I don’t think it is. So many of the ‘bottom-up’ initiatives that I have heard about are fragmented, and sometimes don’t extend beyond one institution. Given the assumed lack of a top-down mandate to teach sustainability in English, these initiatives are often the result of enthusiastic individuals or small groups of teachers, frequently working in their spare time. Please don’t misunderstand me, this is fantastic, but it may not be providing us with a solid base to ensure that sustainability will forever be part of ELT.

What we can do

How do we address these two issues: the assumption that sustainability is not firmly ingrained into ELT globally; and the fact that much of the grass roots work relies on the goodwill and commitment of teachers managing to maintain their enthusiasm? Appropriately for the name of this publication, we need voices: voices to remind those in authority and with agency in the ELT institutions that sustainability education needs to be in-built into our classes; and voices to remind us all of the importance of sustainability to ensure the grass roots work keeps growing and is adopted by the institutions. Who are these voices? I am doing my best not to use the word ‘influencer’, but that’s probably what some of these voices are. We have some loud global ELT voices – authors, publishers and speakers – who attract huge audiences online and face-to-face. So, for example if you are a publisher and your books are sold into school systems, you have, with your authors and speakers, the agency to get sustainability issues into customised books, or to ensure books with sustainability topics in them have post-adoption CPD that covers sustainability. As a teacher, you might think you don’t have a voice. But, you do have a voice. Are you the kind of teacher who colleagues come to to talk about challenges in class? Do you run workshops for colleagues? Are you active in your teacher association? Do you do webinars? Do you write blogs? Do you engage with other teachers online? Or do you share ideas in the staffroom? Your voice can, for example, describe how classes of teenagers discussing careers can bring in SDG 8 ‘Decent Work’ or how a CLIL lesson around citizenship can focus on SDG 16 ‘Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions’. Whoever you are, please use your voice to keep sustainability in the spotlight, to influence the managers in your institution to make sustainability a permanent feature in the curriculum (and make time for it), and to ensure that we always consider the other aspects of sustainability.

Reference

UNESCO (2021). Getting every school climate-ready: How countries are integrating climate change issues in education. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/ pf0000379591