Transepistemic English language teaching for sustainable futures.

This article examines the relationship between language and the environment, focusing on how English language teaching (ELT) often perpetuates colonial, imperialist, and assimilationist legacies that disconnect language from local cultural and ecological contexts. It argues for an epistemic (un)learning of the Western "epistemological error"—a human-centered worldview that privileges dominant Western knowledge systems—to enable equitable validation of Indigenous, heritage, and minoritized languages and knowledge systems in ELT. The author proposes heritage language pedagogy (HLP) and transepistemic language education as approaches that reconnect language learning with place-based, ecological, and cultural knowledges, fostering decolonial, pluriversal, and sustainable futures. An example from a Canadian post-secondary classroom illustrates how a multimodal, multilingual online platform called the Worldviewer facilitates learners’ critical reflection, knowledge co-creation, and engagement with diverse worldviews to challenge dominant Western epistemologies and support ecological and linguistic sustainability.