The SDLL project aims to turn big dreams into reality: we work with school communities and their gardens and redesign these as generative spaces where languages, the arts and principles of permaculture can thrive. While we find our pathways and develop our slow and nature-attuned solutions, people may wonder how do we plan to bring all these complex dimensions together. How can we morph the arts and sustainability with multilingual designs? To be able to accomplish this mission, we have brought into our team three lead artists with unique visions and strong permaculture understandings. Among the three artists, Louise McVey will lead activities and share her creativity built over the years while modelling clay and ceramics.
Louise is bringing to the project wonderful concept ideas that materialise and integrate permaculture design principles and a passion for interactive artistry. Her creations set up beautiful dialogues with nature and one of her most recent projects is a Living Bench. The short video below (4 min.) created by Paul McConnach gives you an insight into the creative process, starting with the concept idea, moving into action, and leading towards the completed bench design now awaiting nature to contribute to the Living Bench.
The Living Bench is a wonderful example of how art integrates into nature’s rhythms. It is also a call for all of us working interdisciplinarily to pay attention to the edges of our professional trainings, to open up to new fields and ask questions anew, to move more into the life of communities that surround us. In these ways, we will be able to discover new solutions that our current environments really need. If you’re interested in knowing more about what Louise is currently working on in our project, follow our upcoming blogs where we will soon share stories about our school windchimes.
Jane Catlin, Teaching Fellow at Strathclyde’s Institute of Education at the University of Strathclyde, Dr Lavinia Hirsu, Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at the University of Glasgow and the SDLL project leader, and Karen Faulds, Professional Development Officer at SCILT, Scotland’s National Centre for Languages, speak to Molly, Communications Intern at SCILT, about the SDLL logo exhibition.
Scotland’s National Centre for Languages (SCILT) invites you to join us for the official launch of the Sustainable Designs for Living and Learning Logo Exhibition! Come along and celebrate the creativity, imagination, and sustainable thinking of pupils from Scottish-based primary schools. This exhibition showcases logos created by young learners as part of SDLL, an innovative and collaborative research project exploring how sustainability and multilingual learning can shape future learning environments.
At the launch event, you will also have the opportunity to meet some of the SDLL team and find out more about this exciting, innovative, and collaborative research project, and its aims for shaping sustainable and multilingual learning environments.
The video below shows entries at the judging panel.
An opportunity for you to dive deeper into permaculture through a Permaculture Design Course in Glasgow starting in March. This is the same course which our core team did last year, which set the foundations for the SDLL project. The first Saturday will be at the inspirational Concrete Garden, and the subsequent five Saturdays will be at other exceptional urban permaculture sites from a food forest in a city park, to a market garden behind a few tenements in the east end of Glasgow.
This term has been a busy one now that the SDLL project is in full swing. The research team and artists have been working closely with our partner schools to explore the first principle of permaculture: Observation. This foundational principle encourages us to slow down, pay attention, and develop a deeper understanding of the natural systems that surround us before we attempt to design within them. Across our participating schools, this principle has been explored through a rich programme of arts-based activities that have focused on each school’s unique local environment. Rather than introducing observation as a theoretical concept, children have been invited to engage directly with nature through exploratory, creative, and sensory experiences. These activities have supported them in noticing details, recognising patterns, and building a stronger connection to the places they inhabit every day.
One of the activities delivered across schools was Plant Detectives. In this session, children explored their school grounds and nearby outdoor spaces equipped with magnifying glasses, transforming familiar surroundings into landscapes of discovery. Children carefully examined leaves, stems, and tiny organisms, often expressing surprise at the complexity and beauty revealed through close observation. The act of slowing down and looking closely encouraged patience and curiosity, helping children realise how much is happening just beneath the surface of everyday environments. Alongside practical exploration, teachers and the research team facilitated reflective conversations, prompting the learners to think more deeply about what they were seeing. Questions such as how plants adapt to their surroundings, what conditions support growth such as the importance of sun and shade prompted further discussion.
Another activity focused on observing an element that is often invisible yet constantly present: the wind. Through the creation of clay wind chimes, children discussed how wind moves through environment. They spent time thinking about the wind, noticing where it travelled, and how it interacted with buildings, trees, and open spaces. These observations informed their designs as they shaped clay pieces intended to respond to movement and sound. Working with clay encouraged a mindful, hands-on approach to making. Once installed outdoors, the wind chimes will become an ongoing tool for observation, allowing children to listen to and reflect on the presence of wind over time.
The impact of these activities has been strongly felt by teaching staff. Reflecting on the project, Lynne McGinn, Head Teacher at West Primary School, shared: “Taking part in the Learning for Sustainability project is helping to transform the way our children see the world. Through hands-on workshops and meaningful real-life experiences, our pupils have grown in confidence, curiosity, and compassion. As teachers, we have seen pupils take ownership of their environment, ask deeper questions, and recognise the power they have to create positive change—both in school and beyond.”
Across all schools, the work so far has established observation as a shared practice between researchers, artists, teachers, and pupils. Next term we will move on from observation as we start to think about the next stages of permaculture design: analysis and design.
Now more than ever, projects such as SCILT’s Sustainable Designs for Living and Learning are vital. At a time when schools and multilingual children face political attacks and damaging narratives about “smashing culture,” this work powerfully reaffirms that languages do not erase culture – they enrich it. Our classrooms are home to multilingual seedlings: children whose languages, identities and lived experiences are full of potential. With care, encouragement and thoughtful design, these seedlings can flourish.
Sustainable Designs for Living and Learning gives children and their teachers a creative lens through which to explore the natural world around them, finding vocabulary to describe their environment, their experiences, and their place within it. We know that the ability to communicate in more than one language brings profound benefits for individuals and society, developing empathy, curiosity, and global awareness. By adopting multilingual approaches that enable all children to thrive, our hope is that is they grow into responsible, sustainable global citizens, confident in their voices and empowered to reach their full potential.
How do languages and sensations interact? This was the provocation of the conference Multisensuality and Language, an online event that took place on November 14-15, 2025. Our team represented by Florence Logan (performance-maker) and Lavinia Hirsu (researcher) shared our emerging work in a presentation entitled: “Dancing with Nature: exploring multilingualism and sustainability through hyperlocality” on November 15, 2025.
Drawing on her rich experience, Florence shared some of the creative processes that sit at the basis of her practice and which we are drawing on to develop activities for primary school children in their multilingual environments. The activities aim to (re)connect children with nature and their own bodies, inviting them to explore how we “become” the world, how play can be generative of language-nature-culture, and how dance and other forms of performance can be forms of care and self-care. Through hyperlocality, we help children develop their observation skills, explore their sense of awareness, curiosity, and awe for their immediate spaces, we turn their attention to the edges of their school grounds, the meeting points of their bodies with the things around them, and the resonance of primary vital forces (such as water) from the human bodies to the elements in the natural world.
The conference was an amazing encounter of people, ideas and sense-thinking. We explored notions of language and meaning-making in contexts that brought in not only the human senses and sensuality, but also the often hard-to-perceive nuances and layers of being human in a world of signs and sign-making. We learned about urban smells, olfactory racism and smellscapes with Stephanie Weisman, language portraits and visualizing multisensory language experiences with Carola Koblitz, and doggolingo – a discursive digital approach to anthropomorphising canine behavior with Beata Bury. These are only a few examples of a rich programme that carved new spaces for touch, sight, sound, taste, gesture, emotion, word, and bodies sensing and marking the places we inhabit.
As part of Sustainable Designs for Living and Learning, we are inviting primary and early years teachers and education staff to take part in a survey.
The survey aims to gather information on how multilingualism and Learning for Sustainability (LfS) are currently supported in Scottish primary schools and early years settings. This information will help move the project forward and facilitate the exploration of various related topics: how languages and LfS can be integrated, and how these two areas of work complement each other.
By sharing your ideas, views and experiences, you will help the project team better understand the challenges education staff face, and reveal the many great examples of good practice and innovation that happen every day in schools and early years settings across the country.
Please note:
The survey will take 10-15 minutes to complete
The survey closes on 31 January 2026
The survey is being carried out by Bilingualism Matters on behalf of the SDLL project team.
To prepare for our involvement in the Sustainable Designs for Living and Learning project, members of the research team, Dr Lavinia Hirsu and Dr Dobrochna Futro (University of Glasgow), Karen Faulds (SCILT) and Jane Catlin (University of Strathclyde), began our permaculture journey in April, undertaking a Permaculture Design course (PDC) with the Permaculture Association. This involved engaging in a series of self-study modules, joining regular online Zoom workshops and attending six in-person practical permaculture sessions in various venues across Glasgow. The Permaculture Design Course was expertly led by Lusi Alderslowe, and we thank her for her commitment, continued support and guidance. We completed the PDC course in October, following a 6-month period of intensive learning. You can read more about our journey below.
April: The Concrete Garden, Possilpark, Glasgow
This was our first site visit where we got the opportunity to meet our peer group and fellow PDC course participants. On this day we learned about zoning in permaculture, companion planting, composting (hot and cold), plant splitting, seed planting and taking cuttings from trees. We planted coriander seeds to take away and watched them grow and flourish at home! The plants that we split have since been transferred to the ground and into pots and we can report that our lemon balm is thriving!
This is actually an incredible community space which even has its own community composting equipment! We toured the site, all well sign-posted such as the pollinator sign to show how the community area is encouraging and promoting biodiversity in their space. We honed our map-reading skills and visited the community shop/larder which shares excess produce, among other things, grown and shared within the local community. The catch and store image highlights the Permaculture Principle: Catch and Store energy. This principle deals with the capture and storage of energy, within the environment, buildings and even society. You can see from the pic how a volunteer has created a visual and if I remember correctly, there is guttering and a water butt just next to the image gathering rainwater.
Pollinator gardenIncredible Edible community space
July: The Wash House Garden, Tollcross Road, Glasgow
It was a scorcher of day mid-July when we visited here! So much so the ice-lollies were melting in the ice box! Here we saw grapes growing in a polytunnel in the East End of Glasgow, near to where the Parkhead washhouse used to be. Who would’ve thought that was possible with our climate! On this field visit, we learned about soil recognition/composition, food forests, harvesting and seed planting.
On this late summer day in August, we had a tour of the Alexandra Park food forest with Louise King. We also got a tour of the continuous flow wormery, did some practical work on seed saving and explored the kitchen garden, including the contents of the polytunnel. Amazing produce being grown in here, including rare tomatoes native to North America! We engaged in practical activities with Sukhema who led a session on Work that Reconnects . This related to the personal and social permaculture part of the PDC curriculum and certainly gave much food for thought overall.
September & October: Kinning Park Complex, Glasgow
Kinning Park Complex (KPC) was the final location at which we would have the opportunity to apply our permaculture knowledge and design tools into creating a design for the outdoor space of this complex. In groups, we each had a design brief to work on, and these included: a) a full site design, b) a warm space design and c) a water harvesting design, based on the needs of the client. During September we worked in groups to create our designs and in October, we shared them with our peers. What a wonderful occasion that was, sharing our learning with each other in such a meaningful and engaging way. The course concluded with a fun and joyful certificate award ceremony which was akin to Strip the Willow in format! Much joy and celebration were had by all! Going forward, we hope to spread the seeds of permaculture where and whenever we can, ensuring it continues to inspire and inform our ongoing explorations of languages and permaculture in the months ahead. In relation to the SDLL project, teachers and artists will now participate in an abridged version of the Permaculture Design Course which will involve inputs from Permaculture Association and self-study modules. The research team, along with the artists have started working with teachers and learners across our 3 schools. We will share updates in our November blog so keep an eye out for that.
