Education for Sustainable Development in Foreign Language Learning

Content-Based Instruction in College-Level Curricula

María J. de la Fuente, María J. de la Fuente

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000480191
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Languages

This unique volume utilizes the UNESCO Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) framework to illustrate successful integration of sustainability education in post-secondary foreign language (FL) learning.

Showcasing a variety of approaches to using content-based instruction (CBI) in college-level courses, this text valuably demonstrates how topics relating to environmental, social, and cultural dimensions of sustainability can be integrated in FL curricula. Chapters draw on case studies from colleges throughout the US and consider theoretical and practical concerns relating to models of sustainability-based teaching and learning. Chapters present examples of project-, problem-, and task-based approaches, as well as field work, debate, and reflective pedagogies to enhance students' awareness and engagement with sustainable development issues as they acquire a foreign language. Insights and recommendations apply across languages and highlight the potential contribution of FL learning to promote sustainability literacy amongst learners.

This text will benefit researchers, academics, and educators in higher education with an interest in Modern Foreign Languages, sustainability education, training, and leadership more broadly.

Part 1 Approaches to Integrating Education for Sustainable Development into Foreign Language Curricula

1 Sustainability and the Pluriverse

From Environmental Humanities Theory to Content-Based Instruction in Spanish Curricula

Laura Barbas-Rhoden

DOI: 10.4324/9781003080183-3

Introduction

Environmental humanities is an interdisciplinary field of work that theorizes and interrogates ways of thinking, being, and doing that have shaped socioenvironmental pasts and present, and which must be engaged for inclusive human futures. Environmental humanities thinking emphasizes that humans are always already enmeshed in a socioenvironmental world. It recognizes ontological diversity, that is, that human understandings and experiences of the world are heterogeneous, and notes that power dynamics shape the influence of diverse ways of knowing in the world (O’Gorman et al., 2019, pp. 445–447). Thinking with the environmental humanities, particularly in its most critical expressions, opens abundant possibilities for content-based instruction (CBI) in modern languages.

How, though, may one who is unfamiliar with scholarship in the environmental humanities begin to consider its implications for CBI? And why would doing so matter? CBI is a well-established instructional approach to language learning that integrates the target language and subject matters or content themes relevant to learners (Kennedy, 2006). This orientation toward learners presents a challenge for course designers and instructors: how does one select relevant content? The identities, experiences, and aspirations of learners are heterogeneous, and increasingly so in institutional contexts in the United States. Importantly, because the environmental humanities as a field acknowledges diversity at its deepest level of expression, it can shape participatory inclusion in the learning and teaching of languages. CBI grounded in environmental humanities creates a learning environment in which each participant can reflect upon their experiences in a dynamic socioenvironmental world. It creates the conditions by which learners can engage new material and is responsive to the needs of learners; such an orientation is a key imperative for CBI (Rodgers, 2014; Stryker & Leaver, 1989). CBI anchored in environmental humanities offers learners a framework to make sense of sustainability challenges at all levels, from the local to the planetary. Thus, those who have a particular interest in possibilities at one level or area of focus are more readily able to perceive potential connections with others with different interests or expertise.

In making an argument for environmental humanities approaches to content-based foreign language education, this chapter joins the call for criticality in CBI (Sato et al., 2017). Sato et al. (2017) define criticality as “a reflective critique of the imbalance of power in society, and the instigation of changes needed to emancipate and empower people” (p. 51). Environmental humanities approaches are anchored in criticality about the imperative for intertwined human and environmental futures of the socioenvironmental world in which human lives are enmeshed. This socioenvironmental world is, in fact, a pluriverse, or “world of worlds” (Escobar, 2018, p. xvi). Equitable, sustainable futures are fundamentally dependent upon not only technical solutions but also widespread understanding of the historical and structural roots of inequity and environmental degradation and a commitment to co-created and sustainable futures (Prádanos, 2018, p. 19).

To grapple with questions of inclusive sustainability for human communities in the pluriverse is to develop or deepen an awareness of the operations of power that create and replicate inequities while being embedded in their workings. It may involve setting aside the idea of sustainability in favor of other concepts, such as renewal, repair, and regeneration, in recognition that dominant economic models are unsustainable in biophysical terms and have been for some time. It means acknowledging that modernity and coloniality are intertwined and have produced institutionalized practices, technologies, and processes that have structured the world in ways that distribute environmental harms and benefits inequitably at scales from the local to the planetary. Through these practices and processes, some individuals have been made to feel the effects of environmental challenges more acutely than others and have fewer resources for mitigating their harmful effects. Frequently, these same people have also been excluded from future-making because their knowledge is marginalized by dominant groups and because they belong to groups that have been disenfranchised from political processes at multiple levels of scale.

Fostering a space in which an increasingly diverse student population can make sense of the present through CBI in modern languages represents an important opportunity for the kind of imaginative, regenerative future-making that 21st-century realities require if people are to confront injustices and co-create possibilities for repairing and regenerating the natural and social systems in which individual lives are enmeshed. In order to further equitable futures, language educators must consider ontological and epistemological concerns, including what knowledge and skills 21st-century institutions legitimize and transmit, and whether such knowledge and skills foster inclusive, life-giving futures. From a disposition of ongoing critical reflection about the historical roots of contemporary systems and cultural humility concerning what has been made marginal or silenced, it becomes more possible for educators to change the quotidian, such as the curriculum, lesson plan, or a publicly engaged project. The CBI praxis that unfolds from such reflection proffers opportunities for students and instructors to discern root causes of environmental crises; contemplate the scope and nature of needed systemic change; and think critically about what is necessary for working collaboratively for change.

In the following sections, I elucidate key theoretical insights from the environmental humanities and highlight how the field challenges legacy structures and cultures, such as disciplinary silos and ‘nature’ and ‘society’ binaries that inform divisional structures in higher education. I then articulate some assumptions about teaching and learning languages in institutional settings and why contextualizing language education is essential in furthering efforts for sustainable and inclusive socioenvironmental futures. Finally, I give concrete examples of how theory informs practice, particularly as related to course design and content selection, in a Spanish gateway course for learners of Intermediate-Mid to Advanced-Low levels of proficiency.

Theoretical Insights: Environmental Humanities for Content-Based Language Instruction

What is the environmental humanities? The authors of ‘Teaching the Environmental Humanities’ offer a succinct framing:

environmental humanities (EH) is an interdisciplinary field of inquiry that brings the insights and approaches of the humanities—centered on questions of meaning, value, and ethics—to bear on some of the most pressing challenges of our time. The field is grounded in the growing recognition that diverse human understandings about, and activities in, the environment are critical factors in making sense of, and responsibly inhabiting, a dynamic more-than-human-world.

(O’Gorman et al., 2019, pp. 428–429)

The notions of “diverse human understandings about, and activities in, the environment” are particularly resonant for language instructors in US higher education contexts; such ideas are often signaled with terms like ‘intercultural learning’ and focus on sociocultural relations (often to the exclusion of socioenvironmental relations).¹

Multiple currents shape the contours of the environmental humanities. In exploring them further, it is possible to discern how each current can shape a curriculum and how, in combination, they can transform it. Most important for the present chapter’s focus on CBI are four critical streams: decolonial theory, critical race theory and studies, critical geography, and degrowth studies.² Concepts and tools from these fields can help instructors design curricula and course plans that make more perceptible the differentially experienced realities of the present; invite consideration of the dynamics over time that have shaped the present; and encourage the imagination of alternative futures. To put it very briefly, critical geography contributes a spatial and scalar register, and critical race theory, a historical or temporal one, especially concerning the technology of legal structures that have shaped relationships (among people, with the land). Decolonial theory centers attention on the operations and persistence of the coloniality of power, through racial capitalism and colonialism, in the Americas and other regions of the world. Postgrowth (or degrowth) studies question the dominant growth-oriented economic paradigm that has been normalized by these historical processes and invites the imagination of radically different futures. Let us consider some key concepts from the four aforementioned (and capacious) critical theoretical fields that are particularly relevant to foreign language CBI related to sustainability.

Decolonial Theory

Decolonial theory has its intellectual roots in Latin American scholars’ work and Indigenous scholars in Canada and the US.³ It draws attention to the existence of Western supremacist ideological and territorial projects in the Americas since the beginning of the colonial/modern era. At its core, it engages with the coloniality of power, a concept elucidated by Aníbal Quijano (2000) to name the logics and legacies of European colonialism, set in motion by colonial projects but not limited to their political lifespan. It posits the inseparability of modernity and coloniality, underscores the persistence of coloniality of power in states and institutions, and asserts the existence of the pluriverse, or a world of worlds (Escobar, 2018; Jazeel, 2017). Decolonial theory provides tools to consider the construction of modernity through institutions, such as universities, academies, societies, and museums; technologies, including legal structures, by which racialized capitalism and extractivism organized people as labor and land as sites for resource extraction (Gómez-Barris, 2017, p. xvii); and operations of power at different levels of scale (Escobar, 2018).

Scholarship in Indigenous studies centers Indigenous ways of being and knowing, which exist in contrast to the ecocidal logics of extractive and settler colonialism set in motion worldwide by colonization (Davis & Todd, 2017, p. 763). Whyte (2017), for example, points out that Indigenous climate change studies “arise from memories, knowledges, histories, and experiences of oppression that differ from many of the nonindigenous scientists, environmentalists, and politicians” (p. 153) and calls for non-Indigenous researchers to “grasp richer senses of their responsibilities to work with Indigenous collaborators mutually instead of exploitatively” (p. 159). Davis and Todd (2017) likewise advocate for shifting discussion about the Anthropocene from its Eurocentric framing by moving the date marking the start of the Anthropocene to the beginning of the colonial period in the Americas, in order to name “the problem of colonialism as responsible for contemporary environmental crisis” (p. 763). As they remind, “stories we will tell about the origins of the Anthropocene implicate how we understand the relations we have with our surrounds” (p. 767). An appro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• About the Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1 Approaches to Integrating Education for Sustainable Development into Foreign Language Curricula
• Part 2 Implementing Sustainability-Based Curricular Initiatives in Foreign Language Education
• Part 3 Exploring Interdisciplinary Collaborations toward Sustainability Education in FL Programs
• Index