Literacy for Sustainable Education: A Premise of Pedagogical Inclusiveness and Multilingualism in Higher Education

Abstract

Literacy has moved from conventional concepts of reading, writing, and counting skills to proficiency in reading, writing, data, technology, and education for sustainable development. The transition aims to prepare students to engage in a sustainable society and the method aims to cultivate multilingualism and inclusiveness in undergraduate education via a first-year writing (FYW) program. Considering the sustainability of such a transition, this study employs a case study of the FYW program to demonstrate to what extent literacy evolves via pedagogical inclusiveness and multilingualism in higher education. The FYW focuses on how educators can ensure pedagogical inclusiveness by inviting the varied language lingua students have before they arrive at our learning community rather than learning the language itself. The new FYW curriculum includes the World English of our students and embraces multilingualism rather than focusing on error correction so that students fit the norms and rules of American English. The longitudinal data from 2010 to 2020 were collected via five surveys with different approaches, and descriptive statistics were used to analyze them. The outcomes indicated that the new premise generates better course outcomes and fosters students as confident and comfortable writers and readers. The FYW program intersects with other STEM programs to build a more sustainable undergraduate education and cultivate students’ literacy capacity for sustainable development and lifelong learning.