Embedding Sustainable Development Goals into critical English language teaching and learning

ABSTRACT

One critical question for English language teachers is how their learners, especially in non-English-speaking developing countries, address global issues as they learn the foreign language. The question seems more viably answered following the United Nations’ dissemination of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015 to be achieved by 2030. Against this backdrop, the present case study investigates an English language teacher’s attempts in his critically oriented undergraduate course to introduce SDGs as a tool for his Indonesian students to foster criticality through English language teaching and learning (ELTL). Data were generated from teacher-selected SDGs texts, teacher-initiated prompts/questions in worksheets based on the SDGs texts, students’ responses to the worksheets, and their SDG-related remarks elicited by the teacher in multiple meetings in a semester. Different theoretical lenses of criticality at language, cognitive, pedagogical, and philosophical levels were employed to examine the data. The findings suggest that the selected SDGs texts and the teacher’s prompts were prepared in ways that could elicit students’ critical responses at word, sentence, and discourse levels by identifying and addressing global issues before and after SDGs were introduced to them. The data could also be reflexively viewed through Marxist, postmodernist/poststructuralist, and postcolonial lenses of criticality.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback. I also thank my CP & L students in early 2019 for their commitment and engagement.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See https://voi.id/en/news/35614/curious-about-the-10-most-tolerant-cities-in-indonesia-come-check-your-city-at-what-number. “[Indonesia] may have the largest Islamic population in the world, … [but] it is not an Islamic state” (Vickers, 2013, p. 1), although there is growing religious intolerance in the country (Sebastian & Arifianto, 2020).

2. See https://www.uksw.edu/pages/visi-dan-misi-uksw.