Promovendin: Irene Althaus
Keywords: Education for sustainable development, language teacher education, affective-reflective turn
Gutachtende: Prof. Dr. Edina Krompák (Universität Basel, Pädagogische Hochschule Luzern), Prof. Dr. Elena Makarova (Universität Basel)
Projektbeginn: HS 2025

Abstract
This cumulative dissertation investigates how an affective-reflective turn in language teacher education (LTE) can help realise Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) as more than an “add-on” topic. While policy frameworks such as SDG 4.7 define ESD as cultivating knowledge, skills, values and attitudes for just and sustainable futures (UNESCO, 2017), current implementations in language education remain fragmented and often subordinated to other curricular priorities (Wals & Benavot, 2017; de la Fuente, 2022). Research also shows that subject-specific approaches and structured support for pre-service teachers’ ESD-related learning are scarce, and that little is known about teacher educators’ perspectives (Goller & Rieckmann, 2022; Maijala et al., 2023). At the same time, scholarship on emotion and reflection in teacher learning highlights that sustainability-related content is frequently experienced as “troubled knowledge” that evokes ambivalent emotions and identity tensions (Zembylas, 2013; Grund et al., 2023). These insights suggest that understanding how ESD becomes pedagogically meaningful requires attention to affective and reflective processes and to how these processes shape pre-service teachers’ and teacher educators’ possibilities for action.

The dissertation therefore asks: 

To what extent does an affective-reflective turn in language learning and teaching contribute to sustainability-oriented language teacher education? 

It conceptualises ESD not as detachable content but as a design principle for LTE and examines the conditions under which such designs become personally and professionally meaningful for pre-service teachers and educator-researchers. Three interrelated articles address complementary levels of perspectives. Article 1 investigates how sustainability is integrated into a bilingual French/English didactics module at a Swiss university of teacher education. Drawing on audio-recorded class discussions, auto-evaluations, student feedback and examples of participants’ sustainability-related projects, it examines how far pre-service teachers connect sustainability with issues of cultural representation, stereotypes and multi-/transcultural competence, and to what extent they make explicit links to sustainable development in their project work (Althaus & Perrin, 2025). Article 2 shifts focus to teacher educators as co-researchers in a Swiss-Brazilian collaborative online international learning (COIL) project on linguistic and global citizenship. Using phenomenological polyethnography with a duoethnographic dialogic stance (Olt & Teman, 2019; Norris & Sawyer, 2012), researchers from Switzerland and Brazil keep multimodal diaries (short texts, images, audio/video) and participate in dialogic meetings in which they juxtapose, interpret and renegotiate the meaning of these artefacts. Multimodal and reflexive thematic analyses trace how emotions and values related to sustainable language education are surfaced, validated and worked with across modalities and transnational contexts, and how these affective-reflective processes shape professional positioning, agency and well-being (Korthagen, 2017; Mercer & Gregersen, 2020). Article 3 offers a conceptual synthesis that integrates insights from Articles 1 and 2 with recent work on sustainability competences (Wiek et al., 2011; UNESCO MGIEP, 2017) and transformative learning (Mezirow, 2000). Through an integrative review and abductive meta-synthesis, it develops a process model and design principles for affective-reflective, sustainability-oriented LTE.

Taken together, the three articles develop an affective-reflective process model that links ESD competences with transculturality, emotions and professional agency and shows how this agency can be exercised in ways that support teachers’ and learners’ wellbeing. Methodologically, the dissertation specifies procedures for conducting polyethnographic, multimodal research in international partnerships, including strategies for reflexivity, layered consent and negotiated authorship (Hill et al., 2023). Substantively, it offers a multilevel perspective on sustainability in LTE by examining both pre-service students’ enactment of ESD-aligned designs and educator-researchers’ own learning trajectories. In doing so, it clarifies the emotional and reflective conditions under which ESD can be taught in ways that are both pedagogically robust and personally transformative in language education.

Literatur
Althaus, I. & Perrin, R. (2025). Integrating sustainability into pre-service language teacher education: insights from the university of teacher education Lucerne, Switzerland. Ling. Aplic., Campinas, v. 64: e025028, 2025 R. http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/01031813v64120258679130

Norris, J., & Sawyer, R. D. (Eds.). (2012). Toward a dialogic methodology. In D. Lund, R. D. Sawyer, & J. Norris (Eds.), Duoethnography: dialogic methods for social, health, and educational research (pp. 9–39). Left Coast Press.

de la Fuente, M. J. (Ed.). (2022). Education for Sustainable Development in Foreign Language Learning: Content-Based Instruction in College-Level Curricula. New York: Routledge. 

Goller, A. & Rieckmann, M. (2022). What do We Know About Teacher Educators’ Perceptions of Education for Sustainable Development? A Systematic Literature Review. Journal of Teacher Education for Sustainability, 24(1), 19–34. https://doi.org/10.2478/jtes-2022-0003

Grund, J. & Singer-Brodowski, M. & Büssing, A. (2023). Emotions and transformative learning for sustainability: a systematic review. Sustainability Science. 10.1007/s11625-023-01439-5.

Hill, L. S., Ghorpadeb, S., Galappaththi, M. (2023). Toward decolonizing sustainability research: a systematic process to guide critical reflections FACETS, 8, 1–11. 

Maijala, M., Heikkola, L. M., Kuusalu, S.-R., Laine, P., Mutta, M., & Mäntylä, K. (2023). Pre-service language teachers’ perceptions of sustainability and its implementation in language teaching. Language Teaching Research, 1-30. https://doi.org/10.1177/13621688231170682

Korthagen, F. A. J. (2017). Inconvenient truths about teacher learning: Towards professional development 3.0. Teachers and Teaching, 23(4), 387-405.

Mercer, S., & Gregersen, T. (2020). Teacher Wellbeing (Oxford Handbooks for Language Teachers). Oxford University Press. 

Mezirow, J. (2000). Learning as transformation: Critical perspectives on a theory in progress. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 

Olt, P. A., & Teman, E. D. (2019). Un[bracketed]: Phenomenological polyethnography. Qualitative Research Journal, 19(2), 146-155. https://doi.org/10.1108/QRJ-12-2018-0001

UNESCO. (2017). Education for Sustainable Development Goals: Learning Objectives. Available at: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000247444 Accessed on: October 4, 2025

UNESCO MGIEP. (2017). Textbooks for sustainable development: A guide to embedding. UNESCO Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development.

Wals, A. E. J., & Benavot, A. (2017). Can we meet the sustainability challenges? The role of education and lifelong learning. European Journal of Education, 52(4), 404–413. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejed.12250

Wiek, A., Withycombe, L., & Redman, C. L. (2011). Key competencies in sustainability: A reference framework for academic program development. Sustainability Science, 6(2), 203-218.

Zembylas, M. (2013). Critical pedagogy and emotion: Working through “troubled knowledge” in posttraumatic contexts. Critical Studies in Education, 54(2), 176-189. https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2012.743468