“A major stumbling block in the path of implementing ecolinguistic pedagogies (or ecopedagogies) in imperial (e.g., English, French, Spanish) second language (L2) classrooms is that land insensitivity is an integral part of the colonial process. Colonizers “turn land into money” or “real estate”, which can then be subject to “foreclosure” and “dispossess[ion]”, allowing them to annex territory and build colonies (Veracini, 2022, p.76-77). As a result, applied linguistics, and the imperial languages that it researches and promotes, has played a part in current environmental degradation (Pennycook, 2021), leading Skutnabb-Kangas (2003) to quip that “[m]ost non-Indigenous people need a lot of guidance to even start understanding the primacy of land” in education (p. 32). This poses a challenge for imperial L2 teachers to implement relevant and non-symbolic ecopedagogies that not only promote land-centered L2 learning but also lead to concrete environmental action.
Ecolinguistic pedagogies, or ecopedagogies, have the capacity to “green” applied linguistics when it involves environmental attunement, “attun[ing] to the social and natural conditions of a given environment” (Steffensen, 2024, p. 30, 12). This expands the four attunement skills (listening, reading, speaking, writing), further broadening the already multimodal communicative repertoire (aural, visual, semiotic; Wei & García, 2022).”
The entire entry can be read here: https://bild-lida.ca/blog/uncategorized/environmentally-attuning-to-the-land-through-medicine-wheel-gardening-by-rhonda-chung
BILD is a critical sociolinguistic blog started by members of McGill University's Department of Integrated Studies in Education with the goal of discussing our language experiences in the multilingual setting of Montreal.