“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.
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). […]
One important step that I purposely took to challenge my Western views was to embark on environmental attunement with my child. As Jean Piaget’s work in developmental psychology demonstrates, observing one’s child is not new when developing research. Unlike Piaget, however, I am a mother, and my relationship to and observations of my child have occurred both inside and outside of my body, creating a much more personalized experience. While positivist research theories would be wary of such deeply subjective observations, Simpson (2014) taught me how important learning from children can be. My child has a unique developmental advantage over me: he does not have decades of a colonial education to unpack to understand our land-based work. His comparatively uncolonized observations and reflections have informed how I have approached our Landguaging pedagogy.”
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.