Building sustainability into ELT – are we doing enough?

The negative environmental impact of the global ELT community and the opportunities we have in climate change education have been moving up our agenda in recent years. But are the many initiatives that we are putting into place enough to make any real difference? This webinar looked at some of the issues.

Summary

In the last two years, there has been a lot of activity in ELT around the climate emergency and how we can engage with it. Across the stakeholders there have been myriad initiatives around both the mitigation of our negative impacts, and the ways we in which can engage with the climate crisis in our classrooms. But perhaps it’s time to be a little more radical and face up to some of the elephants in the room. Elephants such as international student travel, the ongoing reliance on single-use paper coursebooks and the cautious approach still taken to climate issues in ELT materials. We looked at these and others, and discuss them in the webinar.

About the presenter

Christopher Graham holds a degree in Politics from Warwick university, a Cambridge DELTA and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He is a freelance English language teacher educator, researcher and author. He has worked in the field since 1981 in over 30 countries for the British Council, ministries of education and international publishers.

He was one of the founders of ELT Footprint, a 2020 ELTons Award winner, and is currently working on research, materials writing and media activities around ELT and climate change for the British Council as part of the Climate Action in Language Education project.

Recent publications include:

Climate action in language education. Activities for low resource classrooms, with Bilsborough, K, Barber D and Kral, T, British Council, 2022.

50 Ways to be a Greener Teacher Wayzgoose Press, 2022.

21st Century Skills in the ELT Classroom – A Guide for Teachers, (contributing editor) Garnet Education, 2020.

Chris sits on the IATEFL conference committee and the EVE mentoring committee.

Watch the video