The EU and environmental education: a multimodal ecological discourse analysis

Abstract

Abstract In the last few years, the European Union (EU) has been creating a wide range of educational resources for teachers and students to encourage discussion in class on sensitive issues such as environmental protection and sustainability. Following the tradition of multimodal discourse analysis and research on ecolinguistics, this study aims to analyse the webpage “Environment, climate and energy”, from the EU website Learning Corner, focussing on a sample of informative and didactic resources aimed at explaining the institution’s environmental policies to younger generations. In particular, the analysis will try to detect the main verbal and visual discursive strategies employed by the EU in order to communicate the institutional discourse on environmental protection to the young and develop eco-friendly consciousness. Furthermore, the research will also take into account the intersemiotic relation of the collected data and see whether the EU employs any positive discursive features as alternatives to the mainstream environment discourses to promote sustainability and sensitize young citizens to it.