As teachers and educators, we play an important role in helping our learners develop the knowledge, skills, and attitudes they need to flourish as citizens of the world, and many of these skills relate to sustainability.
‘Sustainability encompasses the knowledge, skills and attitudes we need to ensure a fairer, brighter future for people and the natural world’
The Cambridge Sustainability Framework for ELT maps sustainability into four dimensions: knowledge, values, innovation, and transformation. In this post, we take a deeper look at what the values dimension involves, and how we can help our learners to develop their skills in this area.
What do we mean by values?
Understanding beliefs and values
What we believe, what we care about, and the importance we place on different things impact on and affect our behaviours. To fully explore sustainability issues and move towards ensuring a fairer, brighter future for people and the wider natural world, we need to develop our understanding of sustainability beliefs and values. This means examining what we and other people believe and care about, and how this informs our actions and behaviours. Often this is about exploring connections – questioning why people and organisations behave in different ways – but it also includes communication. By articulating and sharing our sustainability beliefs and values we open up the dialogue around sustainability and this is key to making positive changes in sustainability behaviours.
Understanding beliefs and values: Classroom tips
When discussing sustainability topics in class, encourage learners to explore and share their beliefs and values. Use questions such as:
- Is this important to you personally? Why / why not?
- What do you believe about this topic?
- Why might someone believe something different to you?
- How does what you believe about this impact your behaviour?
- How is this different for other people?
Valuing people and the wider natural world
To move towards positive change, we need to develop empathy and compassion for other people, other life forms, nature and the environment. Empathy is about understanding other people’s feelings and experiences, but compassion goes further, by including a desire to help. This means being able to consider other people’s viewpoints and recognise what they might need or want. Understanding human rights and social justice is key to this. To ensure a fairer world, we need to be able to explore the degree to which treatment of other people is fair and moral, evaluate whether people’s human rights are met or not met in different contexts, and identify factors that contribute to inequality so that we might move towards fairer societies for everyone.
But as well as working towards a fairer world for people, we also need to think about and engage in activities that help to regenerate our environment. Regeneration is about improving something, so rather than just ensuring that the damage to our environment doesn’t get any worse, we need to engage in actions – activities and projects – that help to improve our natural world and the ecosystems we depend on so that they become stronger and healthier than before. We also need to engage in conversations and participate in projects designed to raise awareness of and promote development that is environmentally, socially and economically sustainable.
Valuing people and the wider natural world: Classroom tips
- Try including nature in lessons, by taking learners outside the classroom, or bringing plants and images of nature into the classroom. Invite learners to talk about what they like and how they feel about nature.
- Help learners to explore human rights and social justice issues by encouraging them to think about the people involved in a situation and whether they are all treated fairly.
- Involve learners in activities and projects that help to improve the local environment, such as growing plants on the classroom windowsill, or organising a litter pick.
Caring for ourselves and others
Caring for ourselves and others involves recognising and exploring the emotions we and others experience, and how these may be caused by sustainability issues and/or impact on our sustainability behaviours. By understanding this, we can start to predict how different conditions might affect our emotions in the future. Sustainability issues are complex, and we can often feel more than one emotion in response to an issue. We might feel sad, but hopeful, for example. Or angry, but inspired to do something. To ensure our own wellbeing when engaging with sustainability issues, we need to be able to hold and reconcile feelings or views which might be contradictory. This includes managing anxiety or frustration, and learning strategies to help manage our emotions.
Our world is changing, and more and more we are seeing the impacts of our behaviours and lifestyles on the wider natural world. To cultivate personal wellbeing, we need to find ways of adapting to change – both practically and emotionally – and develop resilience. Identifying ways of dealing with feelings such as hopelessness or eco-anxiety (the feeling of being very worried about the state of our world) can help us to do this. Feelings like eco-anxiety can act as obstacles to sustainable behaviours. If something is too frightening or feels hopeless, what’s the point in doing anything? So, if we are to move towards a more sustainable future for all – and ensure our psychological and emotional wellbeing – it’s essential to find ways of identifying, exploring and promoting reasons for hope in relation to environmental, social and economic sustainability issues.
Caring for oneself and others: Classroom tips
- Be aware that many learners may experience eco-anxiety when talking about climate issues. Emphasise that this is a natural and common response, and make space for learners to share their feelings. Remind learners that dealing with worry or anxiety relating to climate change sometimes means being okay with not being okay, and knowing that emotions will pass and change.
- Support learners in understanding how to regulate their emotions by changing their perspective or situation, to enable their emotions to shift. This might involve looking for ‘silver linings’, or practising mindfulness exercises to support wellbeing.
- Help learners to feel hopeful about the future of our world by inviting them to look for and share positive success stories relating to sustainability.
Our world is changing, and more and more we are seeing the impacts of our behaviours and lifestyles on the wider natural world. To cultivate personal wellbeing, we need to find ways of adapting to change – both practically and emotionally – and develop resilience. Identifying ways of dealing with feelings such as hopelessness or eco-anxiety (the feeling of being very worried about the state of our world) can help us to do this. Feelings like eco-anxiety can act as obstacles to sustainable behaviours. If something is too frightening or feels hopeless, what’s the point in doing anything? So, if we are to move towards a more sustainable future for all – and ensure our psychological and emotional wellbeing – it’s essential to find ways of identifying, exploring and promoting reasons for hope in relation to environmental, social and economic sustainability issues.
Developing sustainability values in the classroom
To help you integrate the development of sustainability skills into your teaching, we’ve created a set of activity cards for different stages of learning. These provide a range of activities for each core area of the Sustainability Framework for ELT. Here are some examples from the values dimension for different stages of learning:
Understanding beliefs and values: Young learners
Valuing people and the wider natural world: Teenage learners
Caring for oneself and others: Adult learners
Find more inspiration and activities for helping your learners develop their sustainability skills in the values dimension in our activity cards for Young Learners, Teenage Learners and Adult Learners.
Teaching sustainability helps learners to develop the knowledge, skills and attitudes they need to flourish as citizens of the world. Take a look at our “Sustainability Skills” page, and discover tips on how you can integrate sustainability into your English classroom.
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