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 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 curriculum 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 first set of curricular materials will be in French. Other languages will become available later once we have a a proof of concept.

The following frameworks will inform the development of this curriculum: multiliteracies (NLG, 1996; Cope & Kalantzis, 2023), backward design (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005), critical global citizenship (Andreotti, 2014), social justice (e.g., Osborn, 2006), and transformative learning (Leaver, Davidson, & Campbell, 2021).

We plan on conducting research on learners' development of multimodal literacies, intercultural citizenship, and sustainability literacy.