Green Issues In ELT (with Ceri Jones)
Ceri Jones from ELT Footprint joins me to talk about green issues in language teaching. What does the environment have to do with teaching English? Is climate change too much of a hot topic (!) for the language classroom? What can teachers do to weave the environment into their lessons? Special thanks to Charlotte Giller this week for suggesting this topic and Ceri as a guest.
Green Issues in ELT (with Ceri Jones)
Ross Thorburn: Hi everyone. Welcome back to "TEFL Training Institute" podcast. I'm Ross Thorburn. This week we are talking about green issues in ELT. To help us do that we have Ceri Jones, one of the founding members of ELT Footprint. Ceri is also a teacher, a course‑book writer, a teacher trainer, and sometimes co‑host of the "TEFL Commute" podcast.
In this episode, I ask Ceri about what does the environment basically have to do with language teaching? What can teachers do to bring environmental issues into the classroom and raise student awareness of issues with the environment? Finally, how can teachers help to make their classrooms more environmentally friendly? Enjoy the interview.
Ross: Hi, Ceri, thanks for joining us. Can we just start off with, what does the environment have to do with language teaching?
Ceri Jones: I think there are two ways coming at it. One is the individuals who are involved. The teachers themselves as people may be particularly interested in environmental issues. Really the last year, 2019 seemed to be this huge year of mass consciousness where global strikes led by Fridays For Future, for example, gave the issue a massively high profile.
There's even things like from a language point of view into the word of the year last year for Oxford University Press's dictionary was climate emergency. The graph that shows the growth and frequency of the use of the term is amazing. It's this huge upward curve from a general educational point of view.
We're not talking about English language teaching, particularly here but education on the whole. It's also coming into school curricula across the world. The inclusion of environmental studies and what you could call eco‑literacy. Italy has made it compulsory across primary and lower secondary school coming out in what the Italian Minister for Education called the Trojan‑horse approach.
Not that they study it as a subject, but that it is across the curriculum. You can see it then in things like the PISA testing criteria have also included environmental awareness. In Australia, they have built a really interesting framework for further education and beyond. They have all these categories of eco‑literacy which echo the CFR for language for example.
You'd have a level one, a level two, or level three awareness or, what they expect kids to be able to do. I think one of the things that chimes with ELT teachers is there's an emphasis on critical thinking, information literacy, being able to differentiate bias and fact and fact‑checking in general.
Fact‑checking within the whole environmental issue is actually something that's a fantastic way of bringing the two things together in class and with teenagers, for example, by looking at what is a green issue.
Ross: You mentioned, they're bringing this topic into class. What would you say to teachers who perhaps feel a bit unsure about imposing this topic on their students? Maybe for teachers who feel that this is a topic that's best left for science teachers or geography teachers to deal with?
Ceri: Yes, and I think it is a very valid complaint about topic fatigue. "We're always doing this in school. We don't want to do this. It's boring." I would say the thing is that because it's in the curriculum, it's also in the exams. As teachers preparing our students for that, and also for an English speaking community beyond exams in the classroom, this is a big trending topic.
We need to prepare them to be able to deal with it. From a point of view of lexis, for example, they need to be able to deal with texts on this topic. Otherwise, they're not going to be able to function maybe in an exam where one of the reading texts is on this topic.
Just as you need to teach students the vocabulary or for example technology, because it's everywhere around us, you would not teach about technology. In the same way you would not teach about the environment. You're doing your students a disservice if you don't. That would be my call out to teachers who reject the idea as being maybe too political. That might be a fear that some teachers have.
Ross: In terms of it being too political then, what can teachers do about that? I mean, I think you can picture almost like a graph of interesting topics along with how controversial they are. It's probably a straight diagonal line, isn't it? The more controversial the topic, the more interest it can create.
Clearly teachers here need to walk a fine line where they don't want to either upset their students or their school management, or even more worryingly, maybe perhaps the governments in the countries that they're working in?
Ceri: Absolutely, and as you say, it's like if there's no controversy, there's no interest at all, is that there has to be something which piques interest. Kind of like the motivation curve, you have to hit that perfect spot at the top of the curve where there's enough motivation, not too much. It's the same thing with interest. There's enough interest but not too much for it to become personal or heated or problematic.
I was talking to a teacher who's working in Brazil. In one of his classes, he was working with adults who were older than him. They were climate‑deniers in his class. He wanted to talk about the environment with them. They found common ground that they could agree on, which was conservation.
Even if they didn't believe the science of climate change, they were very interested in and felt strongly about the needs to conserve. At the time, there was an oil spill off the coast. They were very concerned there about the turtle population, for example. They had lots of ideas about how the government should be protecting the natural environment.
He said, "Well, OK, I thought that was a way in. You can find a common ground or maybe a local issue, or something that people do feel positively about." I think that's quite an important thing. What we really need to emphasize as much as we can, the positive and the local and things that can be done. Bringing negativity into the classroom, it's a real downer educationally I think.
There's a danger that we're just going to switch students off completely. That effective filter, it can inhibit people learning. All of the connections that you might be making with the language and the subject and that reacting, kind of emotively even to your learning, all of that will be switched off. That means that you're short‑circuiting the learning experience.
I like to look at it from a point of view of narrative, of positive stories, of individual action, of change, that can be brought about by individuals, whilst at the same time obviously not ignoring the big picture, but trying to make it something which does have a positive and more optimistic side to it, I guess.
Ross: Do you want to tell us more about those local topics? How teachers and schools can make them maybe a little bit experiential so hopefully students are involved in these rather than just reading about them?
Ceri: One of the easy topics is recycling and consumption. On a school level, a school can choose to start their own internal recycling system, get these kids involved. A local school had the children actually building the recycling bins. Then there were recycling monitors, who every week would be the ones who would take the recycling from their bins and take them to the municipal bins.
They were learning about the system, just waste management in general. Basically, they were learning about how much waste they were generating. At the same time, they were making suggestions for how to produce less. For example, plastic waste like, "OK, well, how else could you bring your sandwiches to school instead of wrapping them up in foil," which is a typical Spanish way of bringing a sandwich to school?
You could just bring it in in a plastic Tupperware and reuse that. Plastic is fine if you're reusing it, looking after it. Beeswax wraps, but then there was this idea of, "Well, actually we're just going back to what we used to do." Then children interviewing their grandparents about what they used to do.
At the same time in Spain, there was a campaign which was a week without plastic like this challenge, "Can you shop for a week without buying any plastic at all?" For example, with one of my classes, I just went to the supermarket and took loads of photos of stuff wrapped in plastic, loads of photos of stuff, not wrapped in plastic. We just talked about what was in plastic, what wasn't.
Then the kids did the same thing. They went into local supermarkets with their phones and took photos and brought those into class. It just became a class project.
Ross: Great examples there. I think the big advantage of talking about a local river or beach or park, is that it's generally quite a safe entry‑point into these topics. Obviously, as soon as you bring up what government should be doing on a national or international level, then that's when the topic becomes political and becomes a bit more dangerous, I suppose.
Ceri: Yes, I think cleanup campaigns as well those as you say, like an apolitical or cross party or whatever you want to say, it's just local interest. It's looking after your local patch. Things like I live in a beach town, so the beach cleanups, those are perfect. It's that thing of chiming in with the students realities, which is what we do anyway.
With any topic we always try and tie it in with our students experiences and their lives and their contexts. It's exactly the same with environmental issues.
Ross: Ceri, I also wanted to ask you about teachers practices here. It seems to me really important that if a teacher is going to be getting their students to learn about the dangers of climate change, they don't want to do that by getting students to read information about climate change on one‑sided color photocopies...
Ross: ...because obviously, by doing that you are contributing to climate change. What can teachers do to make sure that they're practicing what they preach that as well as informing students about the dangers of climate change? They are making sure that the way that they teach and how they run their classroom is more environmentally friendly.
Ceri: Photocopies are an obvious an easy target. Teachers are pretty good at cutting back on photocopies and have been doing so for quite some time. It's not only from a paper point of view, it's also from a financial point of view in a lot of schools. Also, as a teacher trainer, there's that idea of teaching our teachers to make the most of the activities they have are not to be so reliant on handouts and bits of paper.
They're actually not necessary. Most of what you do, you can do without the photocopies, and things like reusing, having mini whiteboards if the material you want is something that's only going to be used in that moment. If it's something that you're going to use over and over and over. Then invest in even laminating. It's plastic, but it's plastic that's going to be reused over and over and over.
If it's worth it, then you make it, you keep it and you reuse it. It can be very liberating for teachers to be told you don't have to make copies. I can remember years ago as a teacher being told, "Oh no, give them something to take home. They need a piece of paper in their hand. Otherwise, they won't feel they've done anything in the lesson."
We can emphasize more helping our students to learn to take better notes, to be more responsible for chronicling their lessons. That's one side, is the photocopying. Having a little recycling corner in the classroom is another nice idea, just even if it's just for paper. Maybe even raising awareness of things, like chopping receipts, for example, can't be recycled, because they're heat‑treated, and they're full of chemicals.
They have to be thrown into the general rubbish. That's you say what can do. We can only put paper into the recycling bin that can actually be recycled. If it's soiled from food, sorry, can't recycle it. There's little lessons that students can learn through a teacher just running a very simple recycling bin in the corner of the class.
Again, with younger learners, swapping from pens to pencils, so that the writing material that's in the class is all pencils. They get the students to write their names on their pencil and see how long their pencil lasts. They have like a competition whose pencil lasts longest. Just little things like that, which are awakening and awareness of consumption.
There's lots of ways that a teacher can very subtly influence their young learners, inducing them into this whole culture of awareness that a lot of stuff around us is single‑use and doesn't need to be.
Ross: Ceri, thank you so much for joining us. Where would you like teachers to go to find more information?
Ceri: Lovely, if you could give a little plug to the ELT footprint Facebook group, that would be fantastic. There's the blog, which has a section on materials which has lots of links and ideas and resources for teachers who want to start exploring using environment topics in the classroom. We're also on Twitter. We're also on LinkedIn. You need to look for ELT Footprints, and all of those should pop up.
Ross: Brilliant, thank you very much for joining us, Ceri. Thank you all very much for listening. We'll see you again next time. Goodbye.
