Eaquals Online 2025
From Awareness to Engagement – Building Skills and Resilience to Engage with Sustainability Challenges by Rachel Jeffries
by Ali Aydın
Attending Rachel Jeffries’ session “From Awareness to Engagement – Building skills and resilience to engage with sustainability challenges” was one of the most meaningful takeaways from the Eaquals 2025 series, not because it added yet another definition of sustainability to my teaching repertoire, but because it somehow reframed how sustainability can live inside pedagogy rather than merely decorate it. What distinguished this seminar from other valuable talks was its firm shift from declarative knowledge (talking about sustainability) towards process-based pedagogy (experiencing sustainability). Jeffries’ emphasis on embedding sustainability through task design, rather than overt meta-language, resonated deeply with my ongoing practice in AL 102 – Academic Literacies, where I guide students toward social inquiry through the theme of “21st-century dependencies and behavioral addictions.”
The Cambridge Sustainability Framework for ELT – especially its triadic structure of Knowledge, Values, and Transformation/Innovation – provided intellectual scaffolding for something I had intuitively been doing but had not yet conceptualized within a formal theoretical frame. In my course, I already encourage students to explore addictive behaviors (digital overuse, fast consumption, emotional outsourcing, etc.) not simply as isolated psychological phenomena but as symptoms of wider systemic imbalances. The framework’s first strand – understanding sustainability and thinking in systems – illuminated how these so-called “individual addictions” are in fact anchored in social, economic, and technological ecosystems. That realization helped me see that I am not merely helping students research “topics”; I am cultivating literacy of interdependence.
Jeffries’s emphasis on the need for sustainability education to move from awareness to agency also pushed me to reconsider my own stance in the classroom. Rather than positioning learners as passive recipients of concern, the sustainability framework invites them to participate as knowledge-makers and meaning-shapers. This aligns strongly with AL 102’s emphasis on student-led inquiry: instead of teaching sustainability explicitly, I design projects that compel them to notice, question, and trace consequences. Just as her example work with the “scooter” prompted students to ask “Where does this come from?”, “Who made it?”, “Why was it produced in this form?”, my students begin to interrogate invisible infrastructures behind everyday dependencies: Who profits from students’ screen fatigue? Which values are normalized when convenience outweighs wellbeing? How does algorithmic persuasion reshape agency?
The session also deepened my appreciation of values as pedagogy, not merely curriculum content. By embedding reflective questioning inside research tasks, students gradually internalize relational responsibility: “How does my action connect to a larger ecology of consequences?” This is precisely the turning point where sustainability ceases to be a moral slogan and becomes a literacy practice. The framework helped me recognize that resilience is not built by warning learners about a crisis, but through empowering them to imagine themselves as contributors to change.
Finally, the transformation/innovation dimension encouraged me to rethink how learning outcomes in AL 102 might develop in the future. At the moment, assessment mainly focuses on research, analysis and critical discussion. However, the seminar showed me that sustainability becomes more meaningful when students also have a chance to apply what they learn, even in small or indirect ways. I am not yet integrating micro-action or solution-based components into the course, but I now see the value of considering this shift. It may help students connect academic literacy with real-world awareness and personal responsibility. Even if the change is gradual, giving space for small forms of agency could make their learning feel more relevant and empowering.
In essence, this seminar helped me articulate what I was already intuitively practicing: sustainability is not something added onto the lesson; it is something that structures the way learning takes place. Rather than “talking about the planet,” we cultivate dispositions that make learners capable of caring, connecting, and reframing complexity, which certainly turns the abstract concept of sustainability into a more visible daily element of learners of all ages. For me, the deepest transformation was realizing that sustainability in ELT is not a topic — it is a pedagogy of responsibility, dignity, and agency.
