COVID-19: the impact of a global crisis on sustainable development teaching

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a global crisis, one which also influences the ways sustainability is being taught at universities. This paper undertakes an analysis of the extent to which COVID-19 as a whole and the lockdown it triggered in particular, which has led to the suspension of presence-based teaching in universities worldwide and influenced teaching on matters related to sustainable development. By means of a worldwide survey involving higher education institutions across all continents, the study has identified a number of patterns, trends and problems. The results from the study show that the epidemic has significantly affected teaching practices. The lockdowns have led to a surge in the use of on-line communication tools as a partial replacement to normal lessons. In addition, many faculty teaching sustainability in higher education have strong competencies in digital literacy. The sampled higher education educations have—as a whole—adequate infrastructure to continue to teach during the lockdowns. Finally, the majority of the sample revealed that they miss the interactions via direct face-to-face student engagement, which is deemed as necessary for the effective teaching of sustainability content. The implications of this paper are two-fold. Firstly, it describes how sustainability teaching on sustainable development has been affected by the lockdown. Secondly, it describes some of the solutions deployed to overcome the problem. Finally, the paper outlines the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic may serve the purpose of showing how university teaching on sustainability may be improved in the future, taking more advantage of modern information technologies

Challenging Social Injustice in Superdiverse Contexts Through Activist Languages Education

In a current world of rapid change and immense global mobility, communities are experiencing unprecedented increases in population diversity that have dramatically heightened the challenge of ensuring social justice for linguistic minorities, including migrants, refugees, and people on the move, with implications for society as a whole. This chapter explores the rhetoric of related policies and practices and the ways in which they respond to the needs of superdiverse communities. The cases of the UK, Europe, and Australia, which all claim their multicultural status and multiculturalism as an important community resource, are discussed. Through an exploration of current research, the effectiveness of languages education policy and planning (LPP) is critiqued to provide a new paradigm that has the capacity to bring attention to and eliminate social injustice in linguistically diverse communities. The chapter argues for the nurturing of new spaces of language use that challenge the monolingual habitus and which can engage the collective autonomy of communities themselves. It conceptualizes how activist languages education can build community capacity and achieve socially just outcomes, thus simultaneously providing a better space for multilingualism and a foundation for peace