‘Good diversity recognition, underdeveloped curriculum’: Students advocate for multilingual curriculum in Australian higher education
Michiko Weinmann
Image by falarcompaulo from Pixabay
Recent education research has increasingly sought to engage with the complexities of curriculum making, specifically by amplifying the voices from the curricular landscape that represent the lived curricula of teachers and students.
Our project Students as multilingual and multicultural influencers was undertaken in 2022 as part of Deakin University’s Students as Partners (SaP) micro-grant program.
Our SaP team consisted of four student research partners and four academic staff as co-researchers. The student partners were enrolled in either their first or second year across the following courses: Diploma of Languages (Spanish), Bachelor of Arts, Bachelor of Health Sciences/Bachelor of Arts, and Bachelor of International Relations. The languages that the student partners spoke or studied included: Arabic, Burmese, Indonesian, Japanese, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Russian and Swedish. Student partners self-assessed as having varying proficiency in their languages, ranging from beginner to fluent.
Project aims and research methods we co-developed by student partners and academic team members and were to inform two project outcomes: 1) a student-led outcome in the form of a project showcase including a series of publicly accessible videos; and 2) a co-authored journal article, led by the academic team members.
We conducted six Zoom focus group conversations with multilingual undergraduate students, co-facilitated by a student partner and an academic team member. The discussions touched on a range of topics, including the focus group participants’ language learning journeys, their language use in university and community contexts, and their views and beliefs about being multilingual. Participants were also encouraged to share any stories about multilingual encounters which they had experienced in the university.
Students’ perspectives and experiences of the university as a multilingual space
While all discussion points generated insightful debates, our focus group conversations about the university as a multilingual space were characterised by mixed responses. All participants agreed that there was institutional recognition of cultural diversity on campus:
The Deakin Indian Club [has] been putting on a lot of festivals. I remember there was recently an Indian Independence Day program; we were dancing in [the] middle of the Student Centre. So that’s how I feel like they respect our culture, and they make us feel included. (Mamoon)
However, the perceived disconnect between the institutional rhetoric around linguistic and cultural diversity, and the reality of students’ on-the-ground study experiences, was emphasised by Aaron, a second-year law student: I don’t think the university has got a well-developed range of curriculum to actually support students academically to develop language diversity.
In Aaron’s view, there were two key gaps in the university’s approach to internationalising higher education curriculum: one, the lack of language learning opportunities as elective subjects, and two, the absence of targeted language support regarding discipline-specific course content and materials:
There is no linguistic support. In the Law School, we’ve got some commercial law electives. We’ve got Chinese, American, European commercial law. I am quite interested in Indian commercial law. But you couldn’t have a very good idea of their law because [there is] no support in the language. Everything was translated back, and all these general articles, like their [legal] principles, [were] based on English, and articles published in Australia or in other western countries using English. (Aaron)
Because of the lack of university support to access relevant literatures published in other languages, multilingual students such as Aaron developed their own strategies to compensate for an underdeveloped curriculum (Aaron). Reflecting on his experience with university assignments, Aaron explained that he himself became the source of news and research from China for his peers:
When it’s something about China, I could just type in Chinese and google in Google Scholar to find not only general news in Chinese, but also scholarly articles from China. I don’t really trust those media from China. But I found it rather useful for me to gather information that way. And I’m the source of news, in terms of China news, for some of my friends. (Aaron)
Overall, focus group participants emphasised the need for a more explicit curricular commitment by the university to languages, by highlight[ing them] as a really important function, not just a nice sort of side gig you study along the way (Monica).
Why universities must multilingualise higher education curriculum
Recent research has shown that a significant language shift has occurred in Australian society and education over the last decades, because of the number of international students as well as changing migration patterns. But as the research participants’ observations suggest, current university approaches to engaging with multilingualism are falling behind students’ realities and expectations. Australian universities have not fully caught up with current linguistic realities, and are yet to move beyond assumptions of tertiary education largely catering to an English-dominant student population. This could have implications for Australian universities’ competitiveness in the global higher education market, as one participant remarked:
Australian universities [are] definitely international but could do more. You only have to look at the latest rankings to see where Australian institutions fare against the New York, the Shanghai universities. We have great universities, [but] we are not shooting the lights out. We are international, but we need to be more international. (Monica)
A re-assessment of Australian tertiary institutional assumptions regarding their student cohorts, institutional (curriculum) policy, and pedagogical approaches to multilingualism in the university seems long overdue. As our research participants remind us, centring curriculum and pedagogy innovation on students’ linguistic and cultural repertoires in all their diversity is key for transforming knowledge generation in higher education.
AI statement: Generative AI tools have not been used in the writing of this blog post.
A/Prof Michiko Weinmann (美智子・ワインマン) is co-convenor of the Transforming Curriculum and Assessment (TCAP) Research Group, and a member of REDI’s Diversity and Social Justice in Education group. Michiko’s research focuses on multilingual education, transnational curriculum, internationalisation in teacher and higher education, and postmonolingual research methodologies.
Further information about the project
Students as multilingual and multicultural influencers project team:
- Student partners: Su James, Ethan Colley, Hend Elkharraz, Nicholas Amos.
- Academic partners: A/Prof Michiko Weinmann, A/Prof Rod Neilsen, Dr Alistair Welsh, Dr Israel Holas Allimant.
Forthcoming publication (2024): Weinmann, M., Neilsen, R., Holas, I., Welsh, A., James, S., Colley, E. & Elkharraz, H. (in press). Students as multilingual influencers: Towards linguistically diverse higher education in anglophone contexts. In: L. Gurney & L. Wedikkarage (Eds). Language education policies in multilingual settings: exploring rhetoric and realities in situ. Springer.