Bringing food sustainability issues into English classes: Preservice teachers' plans and strategies

Abstract

The inclusion of content is not new in the world of language teaching. Studies on sustainability issue alone in the world of CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) have reached up to 1.500 studies in google scholar search. With focus rests on the content and less on the language teaching, it is interesting to analyse whether a group of Indonesian preservice English teachers are ready to plan and implement CLIL in their classes. The article reported a document analysis of 13 CLIL lesson plans on food sustainability designed by preservice English teachers after a three-week lesson planning workshop. The lesson plans were analysed by following the 3 iterative steps of qualitative document analysis research methods, i.e. skimming, reading, and interpretation and the 4 frameworks of CLIL lesson planning: content, cognition, communication, and culture. The analysis revealed the preservice teachers' inadequate understanding of food sustainability issues and disparities in developing activities that would support students' higher order thinking skills. Despite what seems to be a grim portrayal of the preservice teachers' understanding of the issue, it is worth acknowledging that most lesson plans explicitly offered collaborative learning activities and refreshing ideas on how to integrate food sustainability in the foreign language classes.