From a Discourse Analysis perspective, the popular notion of sustainable development is both anthropocentric and controversial as it implies the paradoxical idea that environment can be protected through technological, economic and social growth even if this is also the main cause of its degradation (Antelmi, 2018). Thus, due to this premise, we believe that Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) (Leicht et al., 2018; UNESCO, 2017, 2020) should foster a more ecocentric idea of sustainability, where nature, culture and humans are conceived as interconnected elements belonging to the same ecosystem.
Within this perspective, the aim of this paper is to show and discuss some of the results of my ongoing PhD project, whose purpose is to create a language education course, which employs children and young adults' literature to foster learners' ecoliteracy and environmental awareness, with a focus on the relationship between nature, language and culture. Departing from the wider scholarly field of environmental humanities, the study draws on the developing field of ecocriticism, and it is divided in two parts. The first consists in the initial construction and analysis of a corpus of texts for children and young adults through the use of both the Nature-in-Culture Matrix (Goga et al., 2018) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The main goal is to uncover the narratives and ideologies on nature and the human-nature relationship included in the chosen texts. The second part corresponds to the actual creation of a language education course for language teachers, based on the texts previously analysed and aimed at showing how children's literature and critical literacy can be used in language education as tools to educate for sustainability.
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