How to incorporate climate justice in the language classroom (Green Action ELT)
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A blog that challenges English teachers, and in particular those teaching English as an additional language, to consider how they can incorporate climate justice into their English teaching.
The blog begins from the starting point that as climate change fuels migration, more and more people are likely to be learning English in contexts of trauma. The author describes climate justice in this context as “a necessary but complex topic to approach in the language classroom”.
Across the blog, the author outlines and illustrates a pedagogy of eco-critical language awareness (Eco-CLA), writing that “This means focussing on values of social justice and having explicit conversations about power relationships and language in the classroom” The blog ends with links to a range of websites that can support teachers to bring climate and language teaching together.
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This resource was sourced by the research team, rather than recommended by an educator taking part in the research. However, educators working at a range of educational stages shared how they had used or planned to use language and literacy teaching to draw attention to climate justice and wider issues of justice.
The following quotes are some examples:
“They [pupils] need to learn what justice is before they can learn about climate justice. I’m just thinking of phonics, it’s a very simple thing, but like, you don’t expect them to read a word before you’ve taught it to them, and taught them how to say it. And that’s the same for any subject, really. So, in any activities or workshops or lessons, how can we expect them to know what justice looks like for them, if they don’t have their own sense of justice and know what it is for them. It’s a really important thing to start with.” Newcastle-based trainee educator
“It’s interesting because this relates to what I’ve been teaching them about social injustice and breaking it down into what do the words mean: what does justice mean, what does social mean, what do they mean when they are together, and what is injustice? So it’s that thing of you need to understand the word justice before you can go anywhere on this, because, as we’ve said before, climate change is something that happens. So what do we mean by justice, and climate justice?” Newcastle-based primary and secondary educator
“I suppose that was something that I'm probably going to try and explore in my context: that literacy element of things and how we can connect, maybe a few different text sets of like, maybe poetry, maybe a picture book. And pull together something that would have a more literacy focus [...] but with that lens of climate change and maybe activating that more empathy element of the children's learning.” Dublin-based classroom assistant
