Sustainability and global issues in lesson planning and materials design

When it comes to integrating global issues into lesson planning and materials, sustainability is probably in your list of top ten topics. Certainly, it’s increasingly appearing in publishers coursebooks; and many ministries of education around the world now insist that it forms part of their national curriculums. As a bottom-up, grass roots movement, English language teachers themselves are ensuring sustainability forms part of their day-to-day classroom content. Teacher-led initiatives such as ELT Footprint (eltfootprint.org) which offer a place for educators to share materials and ideas on sustainability issues also – justifiably – reflect its prominence.

Teacher concerns

And yet, while many of us accept and even embrace the idea that we include sustainability into our lessons, not all of us are certain how to approach it. To illustrate the point, take the key results from a survey (Shift, 2021) of 521 UK-based educators (from primary to tertiary). 85% described the need to teach sustainability as ‘urgent’. 68% believed it was part of the role to teach it. However, 55% believed they hadn’t received sufficient training in how to teach it and a further 52% had never heard of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG)s. (And if you haven’t heard of the SDGs either, don’t worry, we’re coming to them.)

Defining sustainability

Perhaps an initial stumbling block is knowing how to define the term. What exactly does ‘sustainability’ mean? If you ask yourself, other teachers or your students to complete the sentence ‘Sustainability is about . . .’, it’s often only associated with environmental concerns and climate change. This quite limited definition is sometimes referred to as ‘carbon tunnel vision’. In other words, sustainability is reduced ‘to a single (usually green) issue [which] disguises its complexity in an unhelpful way’. (Duncan & Duncan, 2023:9–10)

A holistic view

Perhaps it’s better to view sustainability more broadly or, as Buller and Waters (2024) argue, ‘more holistically’. It is about the wellbeing of both people and the planet so we should be asking ourselves: ‘Is what I’m doing today making the world a better place tomorrow?’. As educators, this means we should view the inclusion of sustainability as helping students to develop a ‘global citizen’ mindset. I’d support such a viewpoint, though, as an English language teacher, it still doesn’t completely answer the question: ‘How can I integrate it into my materials so that students are learning the language of sustainability?’.

Incorporating the SDGs

Which brings us to the UN’s 17 SDGs, shown here through the UN’s ubiquitous and colourful graphic.

The SDGs were launched in 2015 to help foster a more sustainable future globally. They have been taken up in some regions and countries with gusto. In Saudi Arabia, they form part of the kingdom’s ‘Vision 2030’. In Chile, they are an integral part of the school curriculum.

The challenge of language level

From an English teacher’s point of view, we must consider how we might integrate the SDGs into our lessons. A major challenge is level appropriacy. At what CEFR level(s) can we expect students to talk about the SDGs? I ran the SDG titles through Text Inspector (textinspector.com) and you can see the results in Figure 2.

The chart shows that some words used in the SDG titles are suitable for lower levels from B1 and below. However, terms such as poverty (B2), infrastructure (C1) and inequalities (C2) make certain goals and issues less accessible to many learners. So is suitability mainly a topic for students at B2 and above? Not necessarily.

Introducing the goals

We can approach the language-level challenge more positively and consider which goals are accessible to elementary and low intermediate-level learners. Based on my Text Inspector analysis (Figure 2), I designed this simple A2–B1 activity to introduce the vocabulary of the SDGs. I removed all or part of the goals from the UN graphic with language at B1 and below. Students can work out the answer by referring to the colourful visual icons.

Figure 1: UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals

Figure 2: Text Inspector results: SDG titles according to CEFR levels

Figure 3: Vocabulary activity for CEFR A1–B1 adapted from Christopher Graham (2025).

(Answer key: Clean energy 7; Sustainable cities 11; Good health 3; Zero hunger 2; Life on land 15; Clean water 6; Economic growth 8; Quality education 4; Climate action 13; Life below water 14)

Approaching the goals, topics and issues

Having established that the SDGs provide us with a useful set of descriptors, we can now start looking for materials to use related to the different goals. These might include: a photo of plastic bottles washed up on a beach; a text about a sustainable city; or a video about air travel perhaps. However, there are a few points to consider when selecting such material. One is that you are in danger of presenting issues which are depressing and only show the lack of sustainable activity in the world. Instead of starting a lesson with a bad news story, why not choose a good news story so students see positive action? For example, it could be a video interview with an entrepreneur who explains how her company is able to manufacture products sustainably.

Topics from different perspectives

Also think about how you can integrate sustainability into everyday lesson topics rather than just treating it as a one-off topic. For example, if you are planning a series of lessons on sport, consider how this single topic can be approached from the perspective of different SDGs. Take SDG 15 which is ‘Life on land’. From this environmental perspective, sports like skiing can be affected because of the lack of snow on the ground and there is plenty in the news on this topic. SDG 5 is ‘Gender equality’; you could look at the topic of how there are more women’s national football teams than ever before: 221, in fact. Ask students if women’s football (or soccer) is growing in popularity in their country. And from an economic perspective, SDG 8 on ‘Decent work and economic growth’ could lead to a research project on job opportunities in the students’ own hometown or city.

Language practice

Earlier I raised the problematic issue of language level and the fact that some SGD wording is high. But you can still design lessons based around a goal that includes level-appropriate language. SDG 11 is ‘Sustainable cities and communities’, but the fact that the word ‘sustainable’ is C1 and ‘communities’ is B2 doesn’t prevent us exploring the goals at a lower intermediate level. In this example exercise (Figure 4), students have to rank features of a new city. By discussing this, they consider issues of sustainability. Figure 4 can also be downloaded as a Resource online at www.modernenglishteacher.com/media/43620/met_342_online_resources_designamoderncity_john-hughes.pdf.

Figure 4: SDG 11 task adapted for CEFR A1–B1

Personalisation of the task

After students have read, listened to or watched something about sustainably, we often want them to discuss the topic. And, if time allows, we might ask them to do some research on a topic and give a presentation of their findings. They could even work in groups and come up with solutions for a sustainability problem. When designing such tasks, it’s important to make sure they are within the scope of the students’ own personal experience. If you ask students to study and discuss the global problem of industrial pollution, it’s probably too overwhelming and not something that they can actually change on their own. On the other hand, if you look at the challenge of single-use plastic and ways to encourage people to carry their own water bottles, this is something a student can personalise and have influence on at a local level. For example, their group could draw up an action plan to make sure every student in their school carries a reuseable water bottle. Such a task doesn’t need particularly high-level language and it’s something they can actively make happen with poster campaigns – written in English, of course!

To sum up

• Read about the UN’s SDGs and find out if they form part of the curriculum in your country.
• Find more free-to-use resources at websites such as eltfootprint.org
• Sustainability is partly about the environment, but we also talk about social and economic sustainability.
• Use the SDGs as a starting point for topic choices.
• Spend time teaching the vocabulary of sustainability.
• Integrate it into everyday lesson topics such as sport, shopping and travel.
• Personalise sustainability tasks in a way that allows students to influence real change.

References

The Shift Survey. (2025). Available from https://shift-sustainability.co.uk/teaching-sustainability-the-role-of-educators-in-building-skills-and-knowledge-for-a-sustainable-future (Last accessed 20 January 2025).

Duncan, K. & Duncan, S. (2023). The Sustainable Business Book: Building a resilient modern business in six steps. LID Publishing.

Buller, K. & Waters, H. (2024). ‘Teaching sustainability in ELT: what, why and how’. National Geographic Learning. Available from https://infocus.eltngl.com/2024/10/15/what-why-and-how-to-teach-sustainability-in-elt/ (Last accessed 20 January 2025).

Graham, C. (2025). 50 Ways to be a Greener Teacher. Wayzgoose Press.

ELT Footprint. ELT Footprint. Available from eltfootprint.org (Last accessed 20 January 2025).

Text Inspector. Text Inspector. Available from textinspector.com (Last accessed 20 January 2025).

John Hughes is a teacher trainer and coursebook author. With over 80 titles, his well-known course series Life (National Geographic Learning) is launched in its third edition this year with additional ‘Sustainable life’ project-based lessons. He also offers training in materials writing at www.writingeltmaterials.com.