Daniel Barber has had (and continues to have!) an extensive career in ELT, working as a teacher, teacher trainer, learning coach, materials writer and more. He’s one of the founding members of ELT Footprint and is passionate about the environment and how we can do more in the climate emergency. The group has over 3,500 members and has been going since the 24th May 2019, so soon to celebrate its second birthday. It’s a place for ELT professionals to share ideas, lesson plans and projects about how we as a profession can reduce our carbon footprint and become more sustainable in the long run.
There was a great new format in this webinar: we started with a typical webinar format and then Dan shared a padlet for people to share their own ideas.
What do we mean by ‘normalise’? It’s a bit of a buzzword at the moment with ‘the new normal’ but it’s difficult to define what ‘normal’ is…your normal might be very different to someone else’s. We’ve adapted quickly to taking a mask with us wherever we go now (though some of us still sometimes forget) and the idea is to make talking about the environment a part of our daily routine in the same way.
Ideally, on a teacher training course, one of the criteria that we use for assessment would be: How does your lesson address issues of sustainability and the climate crisis? This would help it become a more automatic part of our lessons, thinking about the language learners are looking at, the lesson objectives and how we can integrate the environment into that.
1. Dan says the first reason is a no-brainer and quoted Greta Thunberg: “I want you to act as if your house is on fire – because it is.”
We’re doing so much at home (recycling, upcycling, watching our water consumption) that we should be doing it in our professional spaces too as the crisis extends into these spaces.
2. The 21st century is facing up to be a very different century than that which we imagined back in 2000 and Dan suggests that our learners will need a greater awareness and understanding of the climate emergency as we prepare them for the future. Evaluating human activity and its consequences on the planet is a key skill for the next generation.
3. There was a recent article in the EL Gazette about how English is the language of protest, even in places where a small percentage of the population speaks English. Using English puts the issue much more on the global stage as it will be covered more by international news agencies. As English teachers, we can equip our learners with the tools they need to fight social injustice and to be activists on the global stage. A lot of the recent global protests (#FridaysforFuture, Extinction Rebellion) have been taking place with people from around the world holding up placards and banners in English. We can easily incorporate a lot of eco-tweaks into our lessons, such as a lesson on writing placards to get a message across in an attention-grabbing or a lesson writing a letter to your local MP and an environmental issues. Steve Brown was mentioned as we were talking about social justice in education and there’s also an interesting article on his site about the sustainability of ELT conferences, but his site is also packed full of interesting articles about a variety of topics in ELT.
“There’s no such thing as neutral education. Education either functions as an instrument to bring about conformity or freedom.” – Paulo Freire
4. There’s a British Council report (coming out early-summer) which highlights that a clear majority of teenage learners would like to have more environmental topics in the classroom. It also demonstrated that teachers would like more training on how to introduce these topics into the classroom. Check out The Climate Connection through the British Council and ELT Sustainable for more support.
How can we integrate the environment into our professional life?
Lesson content
Tweak the coursebook content – add critical thinking questions to have your learners think about the information included (and more importantly NOT included) in a text, or have them think about the purpose for the text – who benefits from the text, what was the writer’s motivation? Look for resources outside the book – what more can you find out about a topic?
Also, many of us have coursebook or syllabus constraints – adding in eco-tweaks as part of every lesson is more sustainable than doing one-off lessons when we find the time.
Classroom
Daily routines, the posters on the wall, the furniture and so on – Dan suggests sharing the current CO2 level with your class and comparing it to previous levels.
School / institution
It could be a survey about how much paper is used and how much of it recycled.
People’s lives outside of school
For example, imagine you cycle to school – leaving your helmet on the desk might encourage learner to ask questions about it. Using yourself, or your students, as a role model to encourage others to think about their habits and changes they can make.
Dan shared a link to the padlet for the community to add to – during the webinar and afterwards – with ideas on eco-tweaks for these four areas. There are also some great resources in the first column to learn more about these issues. And in the final column, there are ideas for What next?
Whilst people started posting, we carried on chatting about various things (I won’t write down all our chat!). We also looked at the padlet at points, so I won’t add those here again!
The difficulty sometimes people can face within institutions if they want to instigate change because of company policy or because there isn’t a climate of social activism within the company. It seems that this isn’t the case in ELT (yippee!) at school level, but perhaps when we think about other areas of ELT, such as publishers: glossy coursebooks, flying speakers across the globe for events, etc. it might be more difficult to effect change.
Greenwashing – the idea of covering over your environmental inequities by promoting something green you are doing. For example, an airline company which advertises how fabulous they are for swapping single-use plastic cutlery to metal (whilst still contributing to the climate emergency by flying). There’s an interesting article shared in the chat about carbon offsets. It’s important to be vigilant and teach our learners critical thinking skills so they’re more able to spot it too.
The term ‘carbon footprint’ was actually invented by BP back in the 1980s! It shifted the blame onto the individual, when in fact it was the large companies. Read more about it here.
There was some chat (in the chat too) about the climate crisis in the media. It’s becoming more integrated into shows, with characters buying their coffee in a reusable cup or talking about the climate emergency in conversation.
Dan mentioned as well using storytelling and personal anecdotes to raise our learners’ awareness – his example was of cleaning bugs off the car as a child when there was much more insect-life about. You can check out the WWF Living Planet Report for information about wildlife and habitat changes. And a link to A Manifesto for Rewilding was also shared in the chat. And here’s a link to the research article which Dan mentioned about the reduction in biomass distribution.
Green Standard Schools is a recent initiative in which schools can be inspected and awarded accreditation for their dedication to the environment. FECEI (a Spain-wide association of language schools) has a similar initiative (in Spanish), as does IH World.
It was an incredibly engaging session and the idea of using a padlet to turn it into more of a workshop was very well-received: you can always add ideas after the event or listen to us nattering on and focus on sharing ideas during the session!
Huge thanks again to Dan for coming along and to everyone who has posted ideas so far – it’s a great community-generated resource for us all to use and add to.