Teaching about sustainable consumption with sustainable tools

Abstract

This paper focuses on the topic of sustainable consumption in order to support teacher trainers and future primary teachers in planning and integrating Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) competencies within their classes. After considering different conceptual frameworks and studies pertinent to language learning teachers, the paper shows how one project carried out between an English class in a university Education department and a local primary school in Barcelona worked together to this end. As a form of action research, the project presented here emerged from an exploration of how language teachers in Higher Education contexts might focus on thecontent in terms of what is taught and how it is taught with respect to teaching and learning approaches and resources as sustainability issues. This study describes how an English language learning project for pre-service teachers combined three aspects (approach, product and content) while focusing on sustainable consumption as part of an action-orientated, transformative pedagogy. This was in order to develop ESD competencies for both trainee teachers of primary educationand children of primary education as well as supporting self-directed and skills for life-long learning.

Keywords

• Education for sustainable development (ESD)
• competencies
• Task-based Language Teaching (TBLT)
• Sustainable consumption
• Approach
• product and content