Sustainability in ESOL - A commitment to our planet

4 Nov

Written By

Carol Samlal

Over the last year, I have had the opportunity to deliver several workshops on Sustainability for NATECLA. It is by far the most pressing issue that we need to understand and action.

Like many others who are trying to bring about increased awareness, I started with the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). They seemed a great place to start and, in many ways, seemed intuitively connected to the range of familiar topics we use in ESOL.

Take for instance, SGD 12 (responsible consumption and production) which has direct links to ESOL topics such as shopping, food, transport, and cultural practices. The other SGDs, when you stop to think about it, connect to every part of our (and our learners’) lives and the wider world to include communities, animals, and the environment.

I first started with the topic ‘shopping’ as many of my learners felt this was a great way to spend free time, that it was even a hobby for them. So, it was easy to use this as a platform to create awareness about the impact on shopping habits and leave it up to them to decide what their next steps would be.

I created a lesson based on the SGD 12, called Fast Fashion & the Environment, and we explored the impacts of fast fashion right down to the very end. There were the usual discussion questions: Do you like shopping? Where do you go to buy clothes? Why do you buy new clothes? What is retail therapy? Then, first having pre-taught some expressions, I asked them a few true and false questions about the fashion industry, for example: the fashion industry produces 10% of all human carbon emissions, the fashion industry is the 2nd largest consumer of the world’s water supply.

That in itself gave rise to a whole host of lovely vocabulary and grammar in situ, but I digress. The main part of the lesson focused on what happens afterwards – the post consumption impact, and for this, I shared with them this news clip from ITV News: How fast fashion choices in the UK are causing an environmental catastrophe in Ghana

It was not an easy lesson to deliver, but it had the desired impact – it was an eye-opener because for my learners, they had not really given much thought as to what happened to their clothing when they no longer needed it. They agreed that nearly all of what we buy isn’t kept for long – if only for being out of season, out of style or just badly sewn. Most times we simply give it away to charity as someone somewhere must need these clothes, after all! It self-licences us to continue to buy, because at least we are helping others as well.

The trouble, we discovered in the lesson, was that there is no happy ending for our love of fast fashion.

At the end of every season, the charity shops are inundated, and although they could go to people here who would benefit from them, more often than not, these clothes are shipped to countries where they are bought (not donated) to be sold in markets there. As shown in the video, the clothing is of cheap quality and many of the items are either dirty or torn; they are ultimately discarded, polluting the land as they dry rot and eventually end up in waterways leading to the sea. The post-consumption impacts carry on…

But returning to the lesson, as much as many of my learners loved shopping and dressing up, the hard reality drove home. They started to think about the impact of their own buying decisions, and what might be a seemingly innocuous action here, spirals into a much bigger problem elsewhere. And it could be a country neighbouring their own, if not their own homeland.

What was clear though, was that my learners (and by extension, people in general) have a conscience and a deeper caring for the planet. They accepted that there are alternatives, and some of them even committed to the growing trend of swaps, buying pre-loved clothing, or buying good quality that lasts.

*Image of ESOL learner’s reflections after the lesson Fast Fashion & the Environment, 2021*

It also left the door open to discuss the impacts of other buying decisions and how that further impacts on our natural environment – with popular ESOL topics such as food and festivals. What sustainable, green changes could be made to minimise resources used in production and to minimise the impacts of waste?

But it is still difficult for people to change - there is the thinking, I am only one person, so my actions won’t make a difference, I can still buy that new dress because I want it (not because I need it).

And this is where we need more in terms of how we teach sustainability. More than just the easy mantras of recycle, reuse, reduce, we need to eat less meat, drive and fly less often; we need to go beyond the offerings of the SDGs to create a deeper awareness around living in more sustainable ways.

Joining the dots - visualising a suspect board to solve a crime

At the last NATECLA national conference, this was exactly my mission. The intention was to show the links between our actions, the SDGs and environmental horrors that are unfolding.

Although the attendees were aware of what global warming is and that warming temperatures has an effect on the climate, there was a vital link missing – what does that all really mean for us? Here is where the visual comes in. The ‘clues’ or known facts are laid out and each is explored more fully, drawing out the chain of events that follow. It would show not only how far reaching the climate crisis extends, but also where there is significant overlap, and why/how one event leads to an array of further catastrophic events, many of which overlap, and eventually linking it all back to the SDGs for tidy and famililar teaching purposes.

In contrast, the sustainability session the day before focused on SDGs (and as mentioned before, this is a great starting point), and encouraged participants to use their existing knowledge of current events to design a lesson plan that used a particular SDG as its main point. Much like I did in my lesson on fast fashion. However, it did not dwell on the reasons behind the reasons for being sustainable, other than we needed to be sustainable to save the environment.

For this activity, I was paired with two other teachers. They were talented and had terrific teaching ideas, and although they were quite creative with suggestions for a sustainability lesson, they didn’t quite make the connection with the impact of good health (SDG3) on our physical environment. For example, why a plant-based diet is better for the environment than a meat/dairy one – the methane and carbon emissions, use/pollution of fresh water, use of land. They lacked that crucial awareness of ‘why exactly are we doing this’.

Admittedly, creating a fun and interactive 60-minute workshop to highlight the numerous climatic catastrophes and how they are linked to human action/inaction, and the key role of sustainability was no easy task. And perhaps, my workshop could have been better, and by that, I mean gentler as it seemed people were having a not-so-easy time of it. But they were a good bunch who rose to the challenge every time. And that is success, because that is the kind of attitude and thinking that is needed - the ability to rise to the climate crisis challenge!

For the workshop, it made sense to choose one area of destruction - the melting sea ice and explore to some depth what that truly meant and our role in it. The question was simple, what would happen when the sea ice melts?

There were predictable answers (increased sea levels and flooding) and then there were more thinking answers that focused on the impact of rising sea levels. Loss of coastal areas, habitats, homes, jobs, arable land, displacement of people, overcrowding. Then some additional input from me - increase in zoonotic diseases, pandemics, desalination of oceans affecting both marine biodiversity breakdown and movement of ocean currents, and the impact that has on the atmosphere, weather patterns and the positive feedback loop for global warming.

*Slide from Sustainability in ESOL (and Beyond) workshop, NATECLA National Conference 2022*

And as the planet takes over from anthropogenic forcing to continue the process on its own, the ice continues to melt and with it, an intensification of what we have already experienced and what the climate scientists have been warning. If we persist in consuming as we do, emissions will keep on rising and the cycle intensifies.

Although in the workshop we explored just one of the impacts of global warming, melting sea ice, there are other worldwide catastrophic climate events for example, forest fires, heatwaves, severe storms, and flooding. All of them leading back to the same set of problems and SDGs.

Teaching this in an ESOL classroom is a task in itself, especially at lower levels, but it important that as many people know what is happening to our planet, and our very existence. That’s why one way of doing this is to link it back to the SDGs - poverty, no hunger, clean water, life on land, good health, good jobs, infrastructure, reduced inequalities… even peace and justice, as countries work together instead of fighting over scarce resources. It is important to give the reasons why we are teaching sustainable change.

Of course, governments around the world need to invest in innovation for renewable energy, alternatives for textile and construction materials, using existing waste more efficiently (leather out of mango skins and road surfacing out of paper recycling waste!). They also need to make very difficult decisions regarding fossil fuels and the meat industry, effectively cutting back on these if we are to narrowly avoid hitting the climate tipping points. Not more empty pledges, greenwashing of industry practices (blue hydrogen, case in point!), dependency on fossil fuels and instead divestment in renewables and degrowth economics where our natural resources are used carefully and safely for humanity.

But we can still do something about this as individuals - our collective actions can be effective. There is still a little time left before our best current SDG measures become obsolete - and everyone needs to do as much as they can, with the full understanding of why they are doing it.

Sustainability - A commitment to life changing, planet-friendly decisions

Embedding sustainability in ESOL (or other) lessons will have no meaningful impact if there is no understanding of what teachers are embedding, or indeed, why.

Teaching practitioners how to embed sustainability should take place alongside this deeper understanding. It would give substance and meaning to any sustainability efforts, and in turn, reinforce the commitment to our planet.

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