Transforming the World One Conversation at a Time: Hopeful Language Pedagogy as a Key to Reimagining Education for Sustainability and Global Citizenship

• In Event: Youth-Centered Education: Climate Learning, Gender and Re-Entry, and Hopeful Language for Sustainability and Global Citizenship

Proposal

What if the way we (learn and teach to) speak about the crisis is part of the crisis?
Seeking alternatives to prevailing doom-and-gloom approaches to dealing with the poly-/meta-crisis in language (teacher) education (e.g., Porto & Zembylas, 2020), this presentation extends an invitation to envision language (teacher) education for sustainable development and global citizenship as pedagogy of hope.

In this time of crisis, ‘education as usual’ does not suffice. Hence, it is time to rethink conventional educational approaches and frameworks, both at the level of primary, secondary and higher education. Given the educational task at hand, as specified by SDG 4.7, all education efforts need to be re-evaluated critically – this includes in language education. The very basics of language education – communication, learning to argue, discuss, and listen, building tolerance for ambiguity and multiperspectivity – are key to all efforts toward global social justice, sustainability, global citizenship, and peace.
This presentation will contextualize language (teacher) education as an integral, albeit unreferenced, element of SDG 4.7, and connect it to broader forms of liberatory, critical, and transformative education. In particular, the presentation will discuss critical pedagogy (of hope, Freire, 2004; of resistance, Giroux, 2022) as well as eco-cosmopolitanisms as potentially fertile constructs that can inform guiding principles for language (teacher) education for sustainability, global citizenship, and peace. At the heart of this discussion sits one of the central learning objectives of language education, the ability to participate in global discourses, which will be revisited vis-à-vis the social aims of language education, that is, among others, the promotion of understanding across various scales of belonging, human and children’s rights, socio-environmental justice.
Building on these intersections of critical pedagogy, eco-cosmopolitanism, and language education, the presentation will explore the concept of critical hope as a potential way of empowering educators and students to envision better, more just, peaceful, and sustainable futures and thus develop communicative agency rather than paralyze them through fear.
Based on theories and concepts of pedagogies of hope (e.g., hooks 2003, Freire 2004, Tarozzi & Bourn 2023, Römhild 2023), it explores the potential of hopeful approaches in teacher education. It reports on insights gained from a M.Ed.-level seminar taught at a German university with n=26 pre-service teachers of English (as a foreign language), which focused on hopeful pedagogies in the language classroom as well as two quantitative surveys conducted at German and Austrian teacher education institutions (n= 106). To gain data and extrapolate insights on the perceived self-efficacy of the participants as future educators in the hopeful language classroom, a variety of instruments were used in these studies, including a pre-/post-questionnaire design and individual e-portfolios compiling innovative, hope-oriented learning products created throughout the seminar. The results yield insights into the existence of a field of tension between prevailing doom-and-gloom approaches and more hopeful approaches to teaching and learning about global sustainability issues, which can be linked to the perceived self-efficacy and role of language teachers in this world.
If our objectives in language (teacher) education can move from awareness-for-the-severity-of-the-situation to awareness-for-our-transformative-potential, the argument goes, the language classroom can become a space of hope – both in teacher education seminars and at schools –, pursue its social aims, and support students and educators to engage in communicative, glocally-situated action (see Biel & Esleben, 2025) in the face of adversity and crises.


Biel, A. & Esleben, F. (Eds.). (2025). Social Justice in Language Education: Taking Action. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Freire, P. (2004). Pedagogy of Hope. New York, NY: Continuum.
Giroux, H. (2022). Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance. Bloomsbury, Academic.
hooks, b. (2003). Teaching community: A pedagogy of hope. New York, NY: Routledge.
Porto, M., & Zembylas, M. (2020). Pedagogies of discomfort in foreign language education: cultivating empathy and solidarity using art and literature. Language and Intercultural Communication, 20(4), 356–374. https://doi.org/10.1080/14708477.2020.1740244
Römhild, R. (2023). Learning languages of hope and advocacy – human rights perspectives in language education for sustainable development. Human Rights Education Review. https://doi.org/10.7577/hrer.5192
Tarozzi, M. & Bourn, D. (eds.) (2023). Pedagogy of Hope for Social Global Justice. London: Bloomsbury.
Zembylas, M. (2023). Revisiting “Pedagogy of Discomfort” Through the Combined Lenses of “Inconvenience” and “Affective Infrastructure”: Pedagogical and Political Insights. Philosophical Inquiry in Education, 30.3, 193-206.

Author

• Ricardo Roemhild, University of Bonn