Multilingualism and Sustainability in Education in Amazon Trapezium

MultiSEAT is a timely, participatory research project aiming to expand the frontiers of multilingualism toward socio-ecological and environmental research to contribute to education for nature protection and sustainability.

Focusing on an indigenous multi-ethnic and multilingual school in Leticia (Amazon Trapezium), the project has three research objectives: 1.

Design and implement multilingually a community-based participatory methodology allowing the collection of socio-ecological and ethnographic interactional data about food supply systems (FSS), deforestation (DEF), and ecotourism (ECOT); 02.

Provide insights into the ideological stances (perceptions, attitudes, beliefs, and representations) that the school community and their families have on these socio-ecological issues; and 03.

Design a pilot of three research-based Multilingual, Inclusive Teaching Sequences (MITS) to tackle FSS, DEF, and ECOT within the indigenous school.

To achieve these aims, MultiSEAT will empower young people from the school through participatory research, engaging them in collecting quantitative and qualitative socio-ecological and ethnographic data.

Analysing indigenous perceptions of environmental issues will provide insights into the complex relations between people, language, and nature.

Also, by considering language as a plurilingual praxis in the design of the MITS, we will focus on what people do and can achieve with their multilingual resources as eco-linguistic capital.

At project end, the scientific community will have an empirically based, comprehensive understanding of how the triangle people-language-nature works.

We will also provide expertise and guidance to non-indigenous local and global communities, policymakers, SMEs interested in bioeconomy, teachers, private/public funders, and stakeholders engaged in sustainability in Amazonia in the implementation of interdisciplinary methods to operate changes through multilingualism, education and environmental research.