British Council The Climate Connection

The opening episode of The Climate Connection considers what the ELT Community is already doing - and what it should be doing - about the climate crisis. The first interview is with Harry Kuchah Kuchah, President of the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language, who provides some general guidance on this issue whilst also talking specifically about his work in Cameroon and with young learners. Picking up some of Harry’s main themes, Deepa Mirchandani and Chris Graham talk about their forthcoming report Climate Action in Language Education, which brings together the reflections and ideas of hundreds of professionals working in the ELT sector. In between, in From the Field, we visit the coastal city of Gabes in Tunisia, where we discover how one school is not only directly involving itself in environmental clean-up campaigns of the heavily-polluted beaches, but is using the waste materials they find to learn English. And finally, in The Green Glossary, the term ‘Climate Emergency’ – the 2019 Oxford Word of the Year – will be explained by an editor from the Oxford English Dictionary.

Young people are heavily affected by the climate crisis. It is they who will have the job of cleaning up the mess left by previous generations. Episode 2 talks to two young climate activists who have already made a significant impact in this area: Jouja Maamri and Sophia Kianni. Jouja is the UK’s delegate to the G7 Youth Summit, where she covers climate policy. She talks about the vital role language plays in addressing the climate crisis, effective ways in which young people can help this fight, and the links between climate and racial justice. Sophia shares with us her experience of setting up Climate Cardinals, a volunteer-led not-for-profit which translates climate information into 100+ languages. Continuing the focus on how young people are taking the lead, 'From the Field' shares some fascinating insights into a project run by the Moldova English Teachers’ Association, who are bringing young people together, through language, to talk about the climate crisis. Perhaps the most famous youth activist of all is the focus of The Green Glossary, as we dissect the meaning of the phrase ‘The Greta Effect’.

Our attention in Episode 3 turns to the classroom, exploring what teaching and learning methods can effectively address the climate crisis. Scott Thornbury charts the history of ‘green pedagogy’, discussing what kind of teaching approaches are not only effective for language teaching, but are also climate positive. The importance of the outside world inside the classroom is also the theme of From the Field, where we visit Voice in Nature English. This school, situated in China’s Yunnan province, inspires its students to use the natural world as a stimulus for language learning. In our second interview, Kieran Donaghy investigates the use of the visual in climate-related ELT materials, and Ceri Jones talks more generally about how ELT Footprint are trying to mainstream climate messages in language teaching. The Green Glossary focuses on the word ‘ecocide’, which has a longer history than you might imagine, and how prefixes and suffixes can be used for language awareness and development.

Teaching materials are the focus of episode 4, specifically how we can maintain the right balance between content and language. To begin with, Aleksandra Zaparucha guides us through the world of CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning), a pedagogical approach which successfully combines these two components. Linda Ruas and Owain Alexander continue this conversation by talking about their websites (Easier English Wiki and ELT Sustainable) which provide hundreds of free-to-use lesson plans on climate-related issues. When writing such materials, using the right language is important – and so in this episode, The Green Glossary focuses on the importance of connotation, using the difference between ‘climate change’ and ‘climate crisis’ as a starting point. In 'From the Field', we visit the coastal city of Gabes in Tunisia, where we discover how one school is not only directly involving itself in environmental clean-up campaigns of the heavily-polluted beaches, but is using the waste materials they find to learn English.

In episode 5, our attention shifts away from the ‘macro’ to focus more on the ‘micro’. In a double-length interview with Stephen Heppell, a world expert in online education and learning spaces, we explore how classrooms themselves can become more environmentally-positive spaces. He shows how small environmental changes can have a big impact on the learning experience and learning outcomes – and why every child should bring their own plant to school. From the Field takes us to Palestine, where we see how different approaches to language education – in the case the Hands-Up Project’s innovative use of drama and remote teaching – can empower young people to learn more about the climate crisis whilst also developing their English skills. In The Green Glossary, we examine one of the most common climate-related compounds in English, ‘Carbon footprint’, as well as many other collocations of the word.

The focus of episode 6 is on educational institutions themselves, and what they can do to promote climate literacy. Our first guest is Asha Alexander, the dynamic principal of a large kindergarten in Dubai and UN climate champion who is a pioneer in climate literacy. In From the Field, we journey to Croatia to find out about ‘The Green Schools Initiative’, and how we can make environmental changes in our own schools. Similarly, in our second interview, Beccy Wigglesworth from International House World talks about their environmental sustainability programme, joining Rose Aylett in reflecting on the role of the ELT industry as a whole in creating a more just world, and how language can be a central part of that. The Green Glossary takes us on a whistle-stop tour of localized varieties of English spoken around the world, looking at words including kaitiakitangai (Māori), bayanihan (Tagalog) and jugaad (Hindi).