Sustainability is at the center of many ongoing conversations, and the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (SD) and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is one of the most significant documents that attempts to address this 21st-century global challenge. 

Given its multidisciplinary and multidimensional nature, education for sustainability must permeate all disciplinary curricula, including that of language and culture programs at all educational levels. By becoming sustainability literate multicompetent multilingual and intercultural social actors, students can address complex issues and positively contribute to a sustainable future.

This project will develop a 1st- and 2nd-year collegiate multiliteracies-oriented modular French curricula centered on those UN SDGs whose foci can be easily integrated at the beginning and intermediate levels and scaffolded in ways that students can engage with the selected topic-based material and understand it for its cultural relevance while critically examining and reflecting upon matters of social justice. 

The following frameworks inform this curriculum and the instructional modules/lessons developed to enact it:

• Backward Design (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005)

• Learning by Design (NLG, 1996; Cope & Kalantzis, 2023)

• Critical Global Citizenship (Andreotti, 2014)

• Sustainability Literacy Competencies (UNESCO, 2017)

They aim to foster inquiry and equip students with the knowledge and skills they need to become critical global citizens.

Started in 2024, this project is funded through the Language Resource Centers  (LRC) program and aligns with its goals of developing research-based instructional materials, offering professional learning opportunities, and conducting research. This grant supports the creation of the following instructional resources and professional learning opportunities:

• templates for developing curricular modules, lesson plans, and assessment focused on the SDG;

• curricular modules for the teaching of 1st-year and 2nd- year French

• a bibliography of scholarly and practical resources on the SDG, (critical) global citizenship, sustainability literacy;

• webinar recordings; and

• PLONS

The majority of these materials are published as open educational resources (OERs) which permit educators to use, adapt, and reshare them to fit their specific needs.

In relation to this curricular project and the instructional materials created, the team leaders are conduction research in the following areas:

• Critical global citizenship

• Sustainability literacy

• Multimodal literacies