On a journey towards Education for Sustainable Development in the foreign language curriculum
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Odette Gabaudan
Abstract
With Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) gathering momentum in Irish universities and elsewhere, this paper provides insights into a language curriculum re-designed around the Sustainable Development Goals, thus responding to the urgency of the global challenges encapsulated in Agenda 2030 (UNESCO. 2016. Transforming our world: the 2030 agenda for sustainable development. https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N15/291/89/PDF/N1529189.pdf?OpenElement (accessed 13 March 2022); UNESCO. 2021. Reimagining our futures together: a new social contract for education. Report from the International Commission on the Futures of Education. https://reliefweb.int/report/world/reimagining-our-futures-together-new-social-contract-education (accessed 13 March 2022)). The revisited language curriculum that used ESD as a driving principle, is a final year undergraduate module entitled Current Affairs in France and francophone countries. The outcome of the review is a strong integration of content and assessments following the sustainability agenda, as well as a broader coverage, contextualization and understanding of the sustainability agenda for students of this module than before. The paper details some of the new content and assessment methods. It also reports on the lecturer’s observations and a small-scale student survey that shows an overwhelming support for the initiative. Overall, this paper aims to encourage practitioners to re-think their curriculum in light of the SDGs as a means of enhancing relevance and depth to students’ learning while also bringing new perspectives to lecturers’ practice.
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© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Research on sustainable development literacy and affective learning and teaching actions
- Articles
- The implementation of plurilingual language policies in Higher Education – the perspective of language learning students
- The relationship between language learning strategies, affective factors and language proficiency
- Exploring the relationship between foreign language anxiety and students’ online engagement at UK universities during the Covid-19 pandemic
- University student perceptions of English language study changes: reactions to remote emergency teaching during the COVID-19 emergency
- Clausal complexity of expert and student writing: a corpus-based analysis of papers in social sciences
- Descriptive and inferential statistical analysis of expectations and needs of engineering students and graduates: a case study at the University of West Bohemia
- The native speaker teacher. Theoretical considerations and practical implications
- Special Section: Sustainable development literacy in Language Learning and Teaching; Guest Editors: Odette Gabaudan and Pilar Molina
- Bibliographical review on sustainable literacy in language learning and teaching
- On a journey towards Education for Sustainable Development in the foreign language curriculum
- Ethics, Dialogue and English as a Lingua Franca for ESD in Higher Education
- Data-driven and research-based learning approaches to environmental education in university contexts: two case studies in Italy and Germany
- Cultural literacy and sustainable development through English: a look from CLIL in pharmacy
- Reports
- Embed sustainability in the curriculum: transform the world
- Raising concepts and awareness of sustainability and the environment in higher education through French foreign language teaching: a multidisciplinary didactic proposal
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Research on sustainable development literacy and affective learning and teaching actions
- Articles
- The implementation of plurilingual language policies in Higher Education – the perspective of language learning students
- The relationship between language learning strategies, affective factors and language proficiency
- Exploring the relationship between foreign language anxiety and students’ online engagement at UK universities during the Covid-19 pandemic
- University student perceptions of English language study changes: reactions to remote emergency teaching during the COVID-19 emergency
- Clausal complexity of expert and student writing: a corpus-based analysis of papers in social sciences
- Descriptive and inferential statistical analysis of expectations and needs of engineering students and graduates: a case study at the University of West Bohemia
- The native speaker teacher. Theoretical considerations and practical implications
- Special Section: Sustainable development literacy in Language Learning and Teaching; Guest Editors: Odette Gabaudan and Pilar Molina
- Bibliographical review on sustainable literacy in language learning and teaching
- On a journey towards Education for Sustainable Development in the foreign language curriculum
- Ethics, Dialogue and English as a Lingua Franca for ESD in Higher Education
- Data-driven and research-based learning approaches to environmental education in university contexts: two case studies in Italy and Germany
- Cultural literacy and sustainable development through English: a look from CLIL in pharmacy
- Reports
- Embed sustainability in the curriculum: transform the world
- Raising concepts and awareness of sustainability and the environment in higher education through French foreign language teaching: a multidisciplinary didactic proposal
