SustainLANG Tallinnassa

Tere tulemast! The Estonian Reading Association EstRA is hosting the 6th Baltic Sea Conference on Literacy: Literacy Environment – Environmental literacy on October 4-7, 2025 in Tallinn.

Have a look at their homepage: 6th Baltic Sea Conference on Literacy: Literacy Environment-Environmental literacy

SustainLANG team member Eva Malessa will be giving a presentation on ”Sustainability literacy skill training in language education – Higher Education language teachers’ views and experiences”, here is our abstract:

Universities play a crucial role in the implementation of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). Core areas of sustainable development (SD) include environmental, societal, economical and increasingly cultural aspects. While these principles, particularly those of environmental sustainability, are frequently cited within higher education (HE) institutions’ guiding objectives, there is limited understanding of their practical implementation (Lozano et al., 2017). Language education offers tremendous potential for implementing ESD, as the pedagogical processes of language teaching and ESD are complementary (de la Fuente, 2021). Researchers have recognised this potential (Maijala et al., 2024), but it has yet to be fully utilised in diverse educational contexts. Set in the Finnish HE context, our study analyses language teachers’ (N=43) questionnaire data by using correlation and content analysis. Cultural sustainability was the most frequently integrated dimension, followed by social sustainability, while environmental sustainability was integrated by only a third of the teachers at least monthly. Institutional support correlated with motivation and the frequency of teaching ecological and social sustainability. Challenges were related to time constraints and availability of teaching materials. Overall, this study demonstrated that teachers need practical support such as ready-made teaching materials and in-service-training to integrate sustainability literacy training into their teaching.

References:

De la Fuente, M.J. (Ed.). (2021), Education for sustainable development in foreign language learning. Routledge.

Lozano, R., Merrill, M.Y., Sammalisto, K., Ceulemans, K. and Lozano, F.J. (2017), “Connecting Competences and Pedagogical Approaches for Sustainable Development in Higher Education: A Literature Review and Framework Proposal”. Sustainability, Vol. 9 No. 10, pp.1889. https://doi.org/10.3390/su9101889

Maijala, M., Gericke, N., Kuusalu, S-R., Heikkola, L.M., Mutta, M., Mäntylä, K. and Rose, J. (2024), “Conceptualising transformative language teaching for sustainability and why it is needed”. Environmental Education Research, Vol. 30 No. 3, pp.377–396, https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2023.2167941