Reconnecting Learners by Tapping into Environmental Vulnerability & Healing
Reconnecting Learners by Tapping into Environmental Vulnerability & Healing
What welfare administration students taught me about the planet — and themselves
This post was originally prepared as a conference presentation that, due to health reasons, I was unable to deliver. Rather than let the work gather dust in a Google Drive folder, I'm sharing it here — because the students' voices in this project deserve to be heard.
For close to a decade, I've been building lessons around environmental themes for university-level English language learners in South Korea. What began as an experiment in content-based language teaching gradually became something I hadn't fully anticipated: a space where students connected their own emotional and social vulnerabilities to the vulnerabilities of the planet.
The context: Welfare administration students and the SDGs
The learners in this practitioner inquiry were sophomore university students majoring in social welfare administration. They were studying English in a required course, but the content of that course was deliberately oriented toward the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Three lesson plans formed the backbone of this inquiry, inviting students to analyze, compare, and reflect on how global sustainability challenges map onto Korean society and their future professional lives.
The SDGs that generated the most student engagement were:
What the lesson plans looked like
The three lesson plans moved students through a progression: from global awareness to local application to personal reflection.
Lesson 1 — Country Comparison
Students researched how different countries are addressing specific SDGs, comparing South Korea to other national contexts. This activated curiosity and surfaced assumptions about Korea's relative position in global sustainability efforts.
Lesson 2 — SDGs and Welfare Practice
Students applied the SDG framework to Korean welfare administration specifically — asking how sustainability intersects with social services, housing policy, mental health care, and care for vulnerable populations.
Lesson 3 — Nature as Healer
The final lesson invited students to explore the relationship between environmental health and human healing. Drawing on their welfare studies, students considered how access to green space, clean environments, and nature-based therapies support recovery from anxiety, trauma, and social isolation.
What students said
Midterm reflections showed robust engagement with sustainability themes — 45 responses directly mentioned the SDGs, and students consistently linked environmental topics to the populations they hoped to work with after graduation. By the final reflection, even in a semester where many students were navigating pandemic fatigue and academic pressure, 9 students specifically returned to the SDGs unprompted in their final writing.
Several students emphasized the importance of nature in healing — citing research on ecotherapy, green social work, and forest healing programs already present in the Korean welfare system. For welfare students, this wasn't abstract environmentalism. It was vocational: if the environment is degraded, so are the conditions for human recovery.
What this means for ELT practitioners
Practitioner inquiry in the language classroom is sometimes seen as a luxury — something you do when the "real" curriculum is covered. I'd argue the opposite. When we invite learners to bring their disciplinary knowledge, their cultural context, and their emotional lives into the English classroom, language learning becomes meaningful in a way that grammar exercises alone cannot achieve.
A few takeaways from this project:
Content-based and values-based instruction work together. The SDGs gave students a shared referent that was simultaneously global and immediately local to Korea. They weren't translating abstract concepts — they were finding words for things they already cared about.
Vulnerability is a bridge, not a barrier. When students recognized parallels between environmental vulnerability and the vulnerability of the populations they study, emotional engagement deepened. This did not distract from language development — it drove it.
Reflection data is pedagogical gold. The midterm and final reflections I collected over multiple semesters (2020–2022) became a running record of student growth — and an honest picture of what resonates and what doesn't. If you're not already collecting student reflections, start.
A note on glocal sustainability
The conference theme — Reconnecting ELT Professionals for Glocal Sustainability — could not have been more apt for this work. The SDG framework is inherently glocal: it asks learners to think globally while acting and analyzing locally. For Korean welfare administration students, "glocal" is not a buzzword. It's the everyday reality of working within national systems that are shaped by international pressures, demographic shifts, and environmental change.
English, in this context, is not just a skill. It is a lens — and a language of advocacy.
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