Bringing the Human Back to the Humanities

By Claire-Marie Brisson, Ph.D. – Harvard University

2024 Recipient of the Klett Award for Sustainable Development Education in the World Language Classroom

When I ask students what comes to mind when they hear the word “environment,” they offer the usual suspects: melting ice caps, carbon footprints, recycling bins—neat categories for a messy world. But when we turn to the French word environnement, students begin to see how perspectives on place have shaped us through time. If we trace the etymology of the word, environnement first appears in 1265, meaning simply “circuit” or “contour”—the shape of things. By 1487, it had become “the action of surrounding, encircling,” from environ, the nearby or surrounding area. At its root, the word describes a relationship: what enfolds us, and how we relate to what is close—whether by chance or by choice. Today, when we bring together the urgency of environmental questions with the ways texts, images, and cultural memory negotiate the world around us, language study takes on renewed relevance.

I’m drawn to a 1921 definition of environnement by Vidal de la Blache, who described it as “all the unsuspected threads from which is woven the fabric that encircles us.”¹ This sense of encircling is essential to language teaching.

To study a language is to engage in how people describe, contest, and imagine their surroundings, and to place that engagement alongside the grammar and communicative tasks we assign students. The result is a practice of learning that feels both richer and more human.

In my classes, I have seen how environmental texts bring those threads directly into students’ hands. When we read Kukum by Michel Jean in my Advanced French 64 course, Discovering French in North America, the environment becomes a meeting ground where memory and language converge. Rooted in Innu memory in Quebec, the novel invites students to hypothesize about environmental meanings through cultural perspectives. Rivers speak of ancestry; trees bear the record of subsistence and displacement. For students accustomed to seeing “the environment” only as a set of problems to solve, literature unsettles the frame. It asks what it means to live with a place, how we remember it, and how cultivating a longue durée of environmental consciousness might shift our view of language itself.

I often pair the novel with historic maps, where rivers appear as highways of belonging, or with oral testimonies that carry memory across generations. Read together, these sources show how landscapes are documented and how they resist erasure. Even grammar begins to resonate differently: when je (I) yields to nous (we), or when the subjunctive shades uncertainty against the indicative’s claim to fact, language itself reveals how speakers situate themselves in relation to what surrounds them.

Language classrooms are uniquely positioned to foster the kind of narrative transformation that education for sustainable development demands.

As Robert Didham reminds us, sustainability cannot advance on critique alone; it must cultivate imaginative frameworks that inspire learners to think, feel, and act differently.² This is precisely what happens when students wrestle with new grammatical forms or cultural expressions: language itself becomes a laboratory for reframing assumptions. The subjunctive, for example, opens a space where uncertainty and possibility co-exist. When language instructors foreground these moments not only as technical skills but as ways of positioning oneself in relation to the world, language study becomes a site of transformative learning.

Extending this perspective, cultural sustainability adds another crucial layer to pedagogy. Research on culturally sustainable education emphasizes that sustainability cannot be reduced to environmental or economic dimensions alone; it also depends on nurturing identity, heritage, and belonging at the micro-level of classroom encounters.³ When students negotiate cultural differences, explore local traditions, or reflect on their own linguistic identities, they are not simply learning about culture as content but actively practicing cultural sustainability. For teachers, this reframes everyday classroom interactions (student-to-student and student-to-teacher) as opportunities to foster multivocality and creativity. In this sense, culturally sustainable education aligns with language teaching’s core mission: cultivating communicative competence that is at once local, global, and deeply human.

Let us bring the human more clearly into dialogue with the humanities by reflecting on the environs we steward and the languages through which we communicate.

Footnotes:

1. « tous les fils insoupçonnés dont est tissée la trame qui nous enlace »
2. Didham, R.J. (2022). Poetic Learning for a Sustainable Future: Transforming Our Collective Story. In: Kleppe, S.L., Sorby, A. (eds) Poetry and Sustainability in Education. Palgrave Studies in Education and the Environment. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-...
3. See: Laine, M. (2016). Culture in sustainability - defining cultural sustainability in education. Discourse and Communication for Sustainable Education, 7(2), 52-67. doi: https://doi.org/10.1515/dcse-2...