ANUSHA RAMANATHAN (TATA INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL SCIENCES)

SITUATING ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING IN ECO-LITERACY FRAMEWORKS : CREATIVITY AND CRITICAL LITERACIES

Education serves to achieve global sustainable goals and ensure social equity and environmental justice. The English language classroom is uniquely positioned to allow for interdisciplinary studies that focus on climate activism, an urgent need in these times and enhance cognitive, social-emotional and behavioural dimensions of learning outcomes among students. This paper draws on existing research in the area of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) which has emerged from the Global North and is widely adopted and aligned with United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (Hjorth Warlenius, 2022), pathways suggested by eco-literacy, largely a Global South movement and eco-pedagogy as initiated by Paulo Friere (Kahn, 2010) that emerged from critical pedagogy with a focus on the well-being of all on this planet. The paper’s arguments are based on eco-literacy frameworks as given by Orr (1992), Capra, CfE (1997, 2002, 2013), and Wooltorton (2006) and eco-pedagogy. The paper presents a review of teaching-learning resources (TLRs) used in select English classrooms in India. It identifies opportunities to instil a sense of critical literacy with a determination to ensure environmental protection and social justice for all. The paper argues to frame curricula and design activities in the English language classrooms to enhance technical/functional, cultural and critical ecoliteracies that enable not merely criticism of the negative, but also includes the positive especially through creative quests for solutions for social justice. The paper explores how this could be achieved by modifying activities and/or content that nevertheless achieve learning outcomes for an English language classroom.

Anusha Ramanathan is an Assistant Professor at Centre of Excellence in Teacher Education in Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India. She is Co-Principal Investigator for various projects such as CLIx, a UNESCO award-winning project. Her research