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A Framework for Sustainable Teaching for Modern Languages



The philosopher Toby Ord, fears that humanity is rushing into its extinction. He believes that the destruction of our civilization could come in this century if we do not do more to avoid it. He is one of the researchers working at the Institute for the Future of Humanity (IFH), a research centre at the University of Oxford founded to give answers to the great questions about the future of our species.

In his latest book, The Precipice (2020) he reminds us that with the advent of nuclear weapons, humanity entered a new age, where we face existential catastrophes - those from which we could never come back. Since then, these dangers have only multiplied, from climate change to engineered pathogens and artificial intelligence. If we do not act fast to reach a place of safety, it will soon be too late. Ord is making clear what steps we must take to ensure that our generation is not the last and how ending these risks is among the most pressing moral issues of our time. He points the way forward, to the actions and strategies that can safeguard humanity.

This is just one among many voices warning us of the impending danger humanity as a whole is in. How are we responding to these voices? How are we, teachers of modern languages, living up to the fact that the question is not whether we could do something about it, but rather how and how quickly we can become greater agents of change in the face of such a great danger.

In 1987 the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) introduced the concept of sustainable development and described how it could be achieved. In the Brundtland Report, also referred to as Our Common Future, the most well-known definition of sustainable development was given:

“Sustainable development is the development that meets the needs of the present, without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

However, 1972 classic The Limits to Growth by Meadows & Meadows - astoundingly as relevant today as ever, stays as an early message that most leaders failed to listen to and act upon. Only recently we are seeing a shift in the global perception of these early warnings. 



Sustainability has been historically perceived as a business issue involving activities that give back to the community to help mitigate the business’s environmental impact. In the last decade, it has become evident that we need to challenge this business model. It has also become more widely accepted that individuals should also strive towards sustainability, by changing their habits, by using their consumer power to reward companies that incorporate sustainability in their strategy and by other forms of activism. In order to further this trend, public understanding and views on sustainability have to be discussed, promoted and supported. Modern language teachers do not only have consumer power but a different kind of power that can be used to shape a better understanding of the issues and obstacles that stand in the way of a sustainable future. 

More recently, the United Nations (UN) has set 17 goals that are a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure that all people enjoy peace and prosperity. They were adopted by all UN member states in 2015 as part of the 2030 Agenda that laid out the actions required to achieve them. These goals are integrated, meaning that action in one area will affect outcomes in others and that development must balance environmental, social, and economic sustainability.

For example, environmental sustainability is responsibly interacting with the planet to maintain its natural resources and climate, but to strike the right balance, economic sustainability should be part of the decision-making process too. In recent times, it is hard to find someone better than Kate Raworth to make a case for regenerative, distributive economies that work within the planet's ecological limits. Author of Doughnut Economics. Co-founder of Doughnut Economics Action Lab and teaching at Oxford University's Environmental Change Institute, she presents a humanist perspective on both the positives and negatives of growth. Growth can be good. Infinite growth is impossible. Unfortunately, our present economies are based on the easily-to-debunk promise of infinite growth. Our planet is a limited reality, not an infinite resource.

The above are just a few brushstrokes of a picture that is rather complex and is captured and expressed by many authors, philosophers and scientists in different disciplines, except for modern language practitioners. Instead of dwelling on why this might be the case, I invite you to consider how you are facing this pressing moral issue of our time. What are your teaching priorities? Are they aligned with the values that would make your teaching worth being called sustainable? And here, ‘sustainable’ would also mean something that you would be able to upheld or defend as a valid response in the face of the challenges and the urgency for meaningful action that our communities need. 

How to know whether our teaching is making that kind of contribution? A framework is needed. In the language sector, we are perhaps very familiar with frameworks such as The Common European Framework of Reference, but this type of framework did not take our present social and ethical challenges into account. I contend that we need an overarching framework that offers guidance and specific targets to facilitate the embracing of a transformational way of teaching that explores accountability, ethics and becomes a contributor to informed responsibility in our students and in our wider communities.

The framework would help you to self-assess where you are in your sustainable teaching efforts and to identify areas for development. These could indeed be about the development of themes and teaching materials, but not only. A Framework for Sustainable Teaching should also consider things such as an event’s footprint or how to create more engaging virtual meetings with students and colleagues.


https://meetgreen.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/eventfoot.pdf

All events have an environmental impact, which inevitably increases proportionally to the size of the event. According to a report, the average conference attendee produces over 170 kilograms of CO2 emissions per day. A 3-day Conference for 1000 people creates 5670 kilograms of waste, over half of which will go directly to landfills. 

Teaching events also have an environmental footprint. The UN has reported that progress on the Sustainable Development Goals remains uneven and it is not moving fast enough to meet the 17 goals on its 2030 deadline. There’s an urgent need to take decisive action on sustainability, which means that universities may have to seriously consider their business model. We’ll have to find a balance between sustainability and creating an event that serves its purpose. Reduced environmental impact, as we know, is not the only benefit. Although the past academic year has been difficult on various levels, it has given us a glimpse of how by changing some of our habits we gained inclusivity, accessibility, flexibility and in many cases, higher engagement.

There have been a lot of reservations around virtual and hybrid events, but they are here to stay.  So the choice is about how we can keep developing and consolidating new ways of doing our teaching and our communication in a way that helps our audiences to see the value of doing it in a sustainable way. McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” is not good enough, we have to spell the message out, and a framework for sustainable teaching will help us to do that.

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