English Learners and the Anthropocene: Climate Migration as Curriculum and Pedagogy in ESL

• In Event: Love and Loss of Land and Language: Reciprocity With the Earth in Language Education

Abstract

Objective
This paper examines the growing global phenomenon of climate migration as curriculum and pedagogy within the context of ESL education. Specifically, it reports findings from a critical instrumental case study on 1.) district-wide curricular initiatives to include climate migration in unit planning for high school English learners (ELs) in one of the largest public school districts in the U.S. and 2.) the pedagogical enactment of these initiatives in an introductory ESL class of native Spanish- and Chinese-speaking students.
Although international law does not yet recognize climate refugees (Bell, 2004), their current and projected numbers are greater than for those displaced because of war or political, ethnic, or religious oppression (Myers, 2001; World Meteorological Organization, 2016). The UN projects 200 million climate refugees by 2050, but other figures place the number as high as one billion (Wallace-Wells, 2019). A decade ago, Author (2010) advocated for the need to conceptualize climate migrants in education and illustrated that a growing percentage of them is entering the category of ELs. He also argued that climate migrants’ traumatic relationship with the land and the attendant sense of loss born from displacement have created a new dimension of identity that fields in language education must consider and address (Author, 2012). Climate migrants comprise both documented and undocumented, national and international, multilingual and monolingual students from every part of the world and language community. They fill seats in world language, ESL, bilingual, and heritage language classrooms and bring experiences, identities, perspectives, and linguistic practices that warrant attention in the language classroom and in language education theorizing.
Significantly, in 2016, the office overseeing language and culture education in one of the largest public school districts in the U.S. commissioned a group of ESL and bilingual teachers to create model unit plans and facilitate professional development sessions to assist secondary level teachers of all subjects to theorize, plan, and meet the sociolinguistic, academic, and cultural needs of the district’s growing population of ELs. Targeting multiple genres and couched in state-mandated standards each for content and language learning (CCSS, 2014; Kibler et al., 2014; TESOL International Association, 2013; WIDA, 2018), these units center on aspects of theme of “journey.” The 5-week unit targeting the informative genre features “migration” and includes explicit engagement in language and content about weather, climate, environment, and the push- and pull-factors of climate migration.

Methods and findings
Ethnographic and observational data were collected over two years at all unit writing meetings and in the ESL classroom of one of the co-authoring teachers while she field-tested the informative unit, which was centered on Hurricane María and climate migration from Puerto Rico (Mackey & Gass, 2015). Findings from specific dimensions of the unit plan and the teacher’s pedagogical enactment of it—in terms of content and language acquisition—will be presented.

Significance
The paper contributes to the emerging scholarship on TESOL and biospheric sustainability by examining curricular, pedagogical, and perspectival dimensions of climate change, migration, and English language learning in actual classrooms with teachers and students.

Author

• Jason Goulah, DePaul University