Conference Agenda

Promoting sustainability at higher education (HE) level has become an objective of national and international declarations and policies. In these declarations, sustainability is considered a moral obligation of HE institutions, and sustainability competencies are considered useful for students’ future working lives (Lozano et al., 2013). In practice, however, the progress for integrating sustainability into teaching has been slow and many academics don’t consider sustainability as part of their teaching (Mokski et al., 2023). This reluctance to integrate environmental and sustainability themes into teaching is often due to the fact that HE teachers find them irrelevant to their discipline (Cotton et al., 2007). Humanities teachers, for example, consider environmental and sustainability education (ESE) to be significantly less important for their discipline compared to HE teachers on average (Christie et al., 2015).

Sustainability (or sustainable development) has been considered a vague, ill-defined, or controversial concept and a fear of indoctrinating students to certain beliefs or values is common across disciplines (Cotton et al., 2007; Christie et al., 2015). Moreover, structural issues such as lack of genuine institutional support and sufficient funding impede the implementation of ESE in teaching (Lozano, 2010; Jones et al., 2008; Kuusalu et al. 2025). Supportive organizational cultures and governance structures as well as professional teacher training are, in turn, seen to support the implementation of ESE (Christie et al., 2015; Holst, 2023). The role of teachers committed to promoting sustainability in their institutions is crucial, as forerunner teachers do not only implement ESE teaching, but can enhance a sustainable organization culture and mobilize collective agency (Ghamrawi et al., 2025).

In our study, we investigated sustainability-oriented HE educators’ views on the possibilities and barriers for ESE in their language and communication teaching. Sustainability in language teaching is a less well-known area of ESE, compared to the extensive body of research in natural sciences, social sciences, and arts. Previous research has shown that language teaching emphasizes the cultural dimension of sustainability, in particular (Maijala and Kuusalu, 2025) – an important aspect of sustainability, which, is neglected by the traditional definition of sustainability, consisting of ecological, social and economic dimensions. Due to their cultural expertise, language teachers can be instrumental in developing holistic, culturally aware, and pluralistic sustainability education. Therefore, it is important to understand in more depth what kind of opportunities and challenges language teachers committed to sustainability education see for ESE in higher education.

Based on in-depth interviews and abductive content analysis, we identified several opportunities and barriers for ESE in HE language education in Finland. Some of the findings are in line with higher education for sustainable development (HESD) literature, such as the importance of university-level support and other teachers' attitudes facilitating the integration of ESE in teaching. Other findings, more novel to the literature, emphasize for instance students’ and teachers’ environmental anxiety and an uncritical attitude towards digitalization in university governance. Some of the teachers are cautious about digitalization, such as the rapid spread of artificial intelligence. They think that – despite its advantages – digitalization is mainly viewed uncritically, and its environmental impacts are not sufficiently considered. In addition, even though the language teachers consider the cultural dimension an essential part of their teaching, some also felt that they needed a better understanding of cultural sustainability and transformation as well as related professional training related to these concepts. We discuss the significance of the results for both sustainable language teaching and broader sustainable development education in higher education.

This paper aims to reconceptualise the role of multilingualism in subject teacher education policies in Finnish higher education through the lens of social sustainability. While multilingualism is increasingly recognised as a key resource for equitable, inclusive and socially just education in Europe and globally, teacher education policies often remain shaped by monolingual norms or instrumental approaches to language. Moreover, multilingualism has received relatively limited attention within conceptualisations of social sustainability. This paper therefore explores the potential of social sustainability as a conceptual and analytical framework for deepening understandings of multilingualism in (subject) teacher education, contributing to efforts to advance social justice in education. The aim of this paper is guided by the research question: How is social sustainability enabled and/or hindered through university policies framing multilingualism in subject teacher education in Finnish higher education? To address this question, the paper examines how multilingualism is discursively constructed in institutional policies related to subject teacher education and how these discursive constructions align with, contradict, or omit key principles of social sustainability.

The context of subject teacher education is particularly relevant given the Finnish National Core Curriculum for Basic Education’s emphasis on developing multilingual pedagogies to support pupils’ literacy and multilingual competence (EDUFI, 2016). However, recent PISA results for Finland indicate that pupils with a home language other than Finnish or Swedish underperform significantly, especially in reading (OECD, 2023). This gap is reinforced by Finnish research suggesting that teachers, particularly subject teachers, often lack sufficient preparation to implement effective multilingual pedagogies (Alisaari et al., 2023; Suuriniemi et al., 2021; Harju-Autti & Sinkkonen, 2020).

The social dimension of sustainability has been relatively underdefined; therefore, this study draws on emergent theories of social sustainability (Magis & Shinn, 2009; Boström, 2012; Missimer, Robèrt & Broman, 2016), including those situated within higher education contexts (Wolff & Ehrström, 2020). Ly and Cope’s (2023) conceptual model of social sustainability provides the primary analytical framework for the study and enables a systematic examination of how institutional policies related to subject teacher education may support or undermine socially sustainable educational environments.

Finland’s national bilingualism provides a unique context to examine these policy discourses from both minority (Swedish) and majority (Finnish) language positions. This allows for deeper understanding of how national language ideologies intersect with institutional subject teacher education policies. This dual-language context provides a nuanced lens for analysing how such intersections shape discursive constructions of multilingualism and for highlighting opportunities for developing socially sustainable practices in Finnish higher education.

The study is further informed by theories of multilingual education and multilingual pedagogy. Key frameworks include Lucas and Villegas’s (2011; 2013) linguistically responsive teaching, García’s (2017) critical multilingual language awareness, and García and Wei’s (2014) theory of translanguaging. These approaches are grounded in principles of social justice and strive to promote equity in education by recognising and utilizing students’ full linguistic repertoires, as well as advancing more dynamic uses of language in educational settings. Whilst these frameworks align closely with social sustainability, utilizing social sustainability as the primary analytical lens allows for a more nuanced examination of how different language positions and linguistic identities are negotiated in higher education and how these negotiations shape policy discourses on multilingualism.

Finally, recognising education as a site for social transformation, this study is also informed by theories of transformative sustainability education (Lange, 2023) alongside critical, engaged and progressive pedagogical models (Freire, 1970; hooks, 1994). Together, these perspectives support an analytical orientation that not only examines policy discourse but also considers their potential to foster more equitable, socially just and socially sustainable futures in education both in Finland and internationally.

The poly-crisis is a time of resource depletion, resource crises, and resource scarcity. Current times impose a “sense of urgency” which calls for immediate action, for engagement in responsible activities and the identification of appropriate pathways to shift the dial away from world catastrophes (Hawhee 2023). However, what resources do children have at their disposal to work towards sustainable futures, to engage meaningfully and agentially with the present moment? How can they build a sense of response-ability when educational systems are oftentimes tied to standards and benchmarks that operationalise their activities and narrow down their ability to creatively transform their environments?

To answer these questions and, more importantly, to implement active and transformative actions, we draw on our work on a three-year project, Sustainable Designs for Living and Learning: Embedding Multilingualism into Learning for Sustainability (funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council) (May 2025-May2028). In this project, the team includes researchers from two universities in Scotland, three artists and three primary schools (Year 1), with ten more schools joining in Year 2 of the project. Together, we work on understanding, reconnecting and re-designing the school environments into multilingual living spaces which embrace children’s knowledges and languages and create opportunities for resourceful engagement with nature. With this project we respond to several pressing realities of the Scottish education system at the primary level. First, we recognise the need to integrate multilingualism (i.e., making sense of the world through languaging (Li 2011)) into children's everyday experiences because classrooms are spaces where 198+ languages other than English are “home” to primary schoolchildren (SCILT 2025). Second, we aim to transform the Learning for Sustainability agenda by developing a new approach to its implementation. Through our activities in the project, we want to ensure that, indeed, every child has the right, capacity and means to engage with resources that take into account their human needs, as well as the needs of their natural environments in the school community.

To deliver on these goals, through our project we redesign school spaces: we build on principles of permaculture which is our theoretical, practical and ethical framework (Holmgren 2002), and we engage the whole school community to redesign their spaces that enable children to learn about and with nature. We turn to permaculture because it provides us with an alternative approach that brings together humans and non-human resources. Permaculture enables children and their school communities to create new resources, to recognise their abundant cultural and language knowledges and to deploy these in a way that restores what nature and humans need in those spaces.