Building a path to sustainability through languages and art
Published: 18 February 2025
Communities will be encouraged to enhance their knowledge of languages in a project aimed at designing new approaches to learning about sustainability.
Communities will be encouraged to tap into, and enhance, their knowledge of languages in a project aimed at designing new approaches to learning about sustainability.
Researchers at the Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde will develop new creative learning approaches and resources for teachers, along with professional development opportunities, to ensure their pupils can fully contribute to their communities.
The study has received funding of £1,269,851 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The announcement is made on the UN's International Mother Language Day, which celebrates language diversity and variety worldwide.
It will focus on multilingualism, encouraging pupils and their families alike to share their knowledge of languages, including those who have home languages other than English.
The project will explore this approach to learning from the perspective of permaculture, a philosophy based on using resources in a sustainable manner.
Pupils will have the chance to create art-based activities depicting the project's aims, under the guidance of local artists, with a view to creating spaces where languages, culture and the immediate environment will be looked after.
Three primary schools – Thornwood in Glasgow, Cradlehall in Inverness and Bowhouse in Grangemouth, Falkirk – are participating in the first phase of the three-year programme, with plans to expand it to another 10 schools in later phases.
Dr Lavinia Hirsu, of the University of Glasgow’s School of Education, said: “International Mother Language Day is an opportunity for us to reflect and honour all languages we use in our daily lives to build communities, to support one another, and to reconnect with our roots and environment. On this day, we also remember how fragile we are in this world where our languages are sometimes used as tools to measure our identities, to decide where we belong, to make sense of a world that struggles to find its balance.
“The UN General Assembly has declared 2022-2032 the International Decade of Indigenous Languages as part of a strategy to mobilise global efforts to preserve and revitalise indigenous languages and knowledges. In line with this call, in our project we aim to repair and build new relationships by connecting our languages with their environments. Working with young people, teachers and artists in schools and their immediate communities in Scotland, we will preserve the richness of our multilingual communities, protect the linguistic and natural diversity of our learning spaces and cultivate new ways of living together.”
Fhiona Mackay, Director of the Strathclyde-based SCILT – Scotland’s Centre For Languages, is a researcher in the project. She said: “This project is for everyone, not just for schoolchildren. Our view is that nobody really is monolingual; there’s a kind of linguistic spectrum and everyone is somewhere on it. Even if people don’t think they speak other languages, they will use them and move in and out of them more than they realise, for example when talking about food.
“It’s also not only for children who speak languages other than English but for people who are learning languages. The aim is to boost performance across the curriculum and boost people’s self-esteem. We want to encourage people to see themselves not as monolinguists but as emerging multilinguists.”
The project is informed by the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), to which Strathclyde and Glasgow are both signatories. Both institutions were placed in the top 25 of Times Higher Education’s Impact Rankings 2024, which assessed the performances of nearly 2,000 universities worldwide against the SDGs.
Watch Tawona Sithole recite 'Language Remains'
First published: 18 February 2025