Promoting Social Justice and Critical Thinking Through Authentic Materials in CLIL Classrooms

This chapter presents a multifaceted project-based assessment from a Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) teacher education course that aims to enhance teacher-learners’ skills with innovative curriculum design for the Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) classroom. Within this project, teacher-learners build 3-lesson units that are specifically designed to foster multilingual English learners’ critical and creative thinking, as well as develop their English oral skills (i.e., listening, speaking, and pronunciation). Each of the units centres on a social justice topic that the teacher-learners’ are passionate and knowledgeable about, and which they believe learners in a range of global contexts will be interested in exploring. The curriculum design project incorporates a focus on sustainable learning for both the teacher-learners and the language learners, as the topics encourage lifelong learning and taking action as global citizens. The chapter begins with an overview of the goals of CLIL and social justice education, followed by an overview of the context for this particular project. Example activities and key materials from various units are presented to demonstrate the ways in which the selection of materials, design of activities, and approaches to assessment can cultivate critical and creative thinking, develop L2 oral skills, and provide opportunities for learners to contribute to positive social change in local and global contexts.