Language education with global responsibility – International cooperation between Switzerland and Brazil

In April 2025, we travelled to Brazil as part of the Movetia-funded project “Linguistic and Global Citizenship – A Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) Project in Swiss and Brazilian Language Education” to collaborate with our partner universities in Campinas and Mato Grosso do Sul (Brazil). The aim of the project is to combine language education with global responsibility and sustainability and to develop new perspectives for language learning and teaching. The trip to Brazil enabled us to experience sustainable places in Brazil and further develop the concept of sustainable language education.

In addition to our embodied experiences with sustainability in Brazil, in our lecture we will focus on the COIL course held in spring 2025 with students from Brazil and Switzerland, which addressed topics such as bem viver, social justice, and sustainable language education through COIL. The students collected research data by reflecting on their experiences in multimodal diaries, exchanged ideas in intercultural tandems, and developed their own perspectives on critical sustainability. In this lecture, we will report on our trip to Brazil and share our preliminary research findings.

• Prof. Dr. Edina Krompák (UTE Lucerne), Prof. Dr. Cláudia Hilsdorf Rocha (State University of Campinas), Prof. Dr. Ruberval Franco Maciel (State University of Mato Grosso do Sul), & Msc Irene Althaus (UTE Lucerne)