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“Not now, staff may be confused”: Institutional resistance to decolonising the curriculum

By UCL CHE, on 5 February 2024

It’s time for the crit. These are words that might send a nervous flutter through the students at the creative arts university Dr. Victoria Odeniyi works at.

A crit is meant to be an open, democratic, and non-hierarchical space where students receive constructive feedback on their artwork. However, for some students, their lived experience of the crit diverged quite a bit from its intended purpose.

Victoria Odeniyi gave a talk titled “Challenges and opportunities of embedding institutional research findings into practice” at Decolonising Language Studies II about her experiences as an applied linguist at University of the Arts London.

Dr. Victoria Odeniyi gives her talk.

Working with the Decolonising Arts Institute, she conducted an ethnographic research project focused on ways of creating more equitable educational outcomes, partly through narrowing persistent funding gaps between home and international students as well as between students of colour and students who identify as white.

The goal was to challenge colonial and imperial legacies and to drive cultural, social, and institutional change by encouraging the institution to critically reflect on their current practices.

This post is the third part of a series where we summarise speakers’ main ideas about decolonising language studies from a series of symposia organised organised Dr Jelena Ćalić and Dr Eszter Tarsoly on behalf of PROLang.

Expectations versus reality: the crit as “un-safe” space

The crit is intended to be an open space for students to display their artwork – such as sculptures and other installations – to their peers and tutors.

Victoria shares her experience about a crit she attended at a location called Safehouse in Peckham, where, over two days, students showcased their work to visiting arts scholars.

She observed tutors commenting on a student’s work in front of about thirty of their peers:

 

Fine art observations: 'The safe house'T1: Have you thought about working much bigger? I think you would REALLY benefit from working bigger... T1: I find the size of the painting really limiting... T2: I actually disagree with Tutor 1... T2: I am really interested in colour. it felt quite juvenile to me...

A slide showing comments made by tutors at the crit.

 

As Victoria says:

“We can see that there’s a disconnect between these spaces of open, democratic, and supportive peer review, where the tutor […] holds back, and what actually happens during interactions. So this was one example of how I felt […] why some students may have found this space particularly challenging.”

Turning her attention to the space, Victoria also realised that there was no plumbing or places for people to sit. She remarks that, ironically, “the safe house… felt unsafe to me.” Students undergoing the crit “needed a certain amount of stamina” to spend two days in this space.

Assessing multilingual repertoires in students’ art practices

Victoria then shares a story about a design student named Angela, who is both Cantonese- and English- speaking and uses both languages in her work.

Angela experienced an element of frustration in needing to constantly explain her work to her tutor, whom she felt was resistant towards her artistic choices.

Observation - Design: 'Gargle and Rinse' "... in terms of my upbringing, codeswitching is a lot to do with like colonisation, immigrants, and like it's just a whole bunch of topics, it's political... ... it's a lot and I had to keep explaining that... when I am showing my work like [to] my tutor who is British and [who] I think is monolingual, he kept asking me oh why did you say it like this, why is like that and I kept or kinda have to keep explain it a lot, while if someone who is multilingual knew the same languages as me watched my videos they were like oh yeah I totally understand that it's totally relatable! ... there's a lot of hand holding in terms of explaining it to tutors so they will understand where I am coming from... because they [the tutors] don't understand." [Student interview]

A slide showing Angela’s work and her comments on being assessed by her tutor.

As Angela said:

“I had to keep explaining… there’s a lot of hand-holding in terms of explaining it to tutors so they will understand where I am coming from.”

Victoria remarks that multilingual students often have to bear the responsibility of explaining their choices even though they are otherwise encouraged to draw on multiple semiotic resources – texts, colours, fonts, and layouts – in their work.

This also raises issues around how students using multilingual practices for their art can be assessed, especially if tutors are not language specialists or do not have an interest in language:

“If the teacher doesn’t understand Cantonese, how can this work be assessed according to perhaps relatively abstract assessment criteria – which is used to assess other forms of communicative practices?”

Facing institutional resistance to recommendations presented in Victoria’s report

As part of her research report, Victoria suggested initiatives to support awareness raising activities around language, multilingualism, and named languages within the academy.

She also suggested that recognising students’ language backgrounds and repertoires would be a way of cutting across institutional categories and labels. As she says in the talk: “We no longer [have to] speak about international students and home students; we can talk about the repertoire of semiotic resources for meaning-making.”

These recommendations did not seem controversial to her, but when she completed and published the report, she was asked to pause dissemination.

Victoria acknowledges that part of decolonising the curriculum and university concerns navigating institutional spaces and practices like those described above. Noting that universities are often sites of struggle and inequity, she observed institutional resistance to suggested changes.

Some of the responses she received included:

  • Competing priorities other than a focus on multilingual repertoires, such as sustainable fashion and climate change, were listed: “Not now, staff may become confused”
  • The predominance of language ideologies and Anglonormativity: “if they choose to come here, they need to do it our way”; “it has to be in English”
  • Questions of whether there would be a “safeguarding issue” if students are using a number of different languages
  • Concerns around assessment: “How can we assess multilingual practices?”

A slide showing responses to Victoria’s recommendations.

Victoria also notes that her position as a linguist (instead of an artist) rendered her an outsider.

She was often asked, “but Victoria, what is your practice? […] [which] implies: ‘you’re not one of us, so please explain what you’re doing here.’”

Victoria’s talk reflects on both the challenges and possibilities of turning the decolonial gaze back on to the university; on students’ frustrations and experience; and on how difficult it might be to actually enact institutional change.

You can watch her full talk here.

You can also read earlier posts in this blog series:

This symposium was organised by Dr Jelena Ćalić and Dr Eszter Tarsoly on behalf of the PROLang (Policy, Research and Outreach for Language-based area studies) Research Group in collaboration with UCL Institute of Advanced Studies, with the support of CHE’s Education Enhancement Grant. This post was written by Kellynn Wee.

Let’s re-centre multilingual communities in our classrooms and research

By UCL CHE, on 1 February 2024

How can we decolonise the curriculum in higher education?

As educators, we often hear this call – and many of us rise to respond to it as a crucial part of our research and practice. Yet spaces where we can share our experience and practices with each other are rare, especially across disciplines.

On 25 October 2023, a symposium on Decolonising Language Studies, organised by Dr Jelena Ćalić and Dr Eszter Tarsoly on behalf of PROLang, sought to address this gap by inviting a prominent group of researchers with diverse disciplinary backgrounds, including linguistics, cultural studies, social sciences and politics, to respond to questions such as:

  • How can we bring the study of minoritised groups, linguistic citizenship and transcultural becoming to the fore in language education?
  • How can participatory initiatives translate into policy and be better embedded into institutional settings?
  • How committed are institutions and researchers to progressive agendas, both in our research scope and our methodology?
  • How can we better include community members as co-authors and fellow researchers in our work?

In this blog post series showcasing the symposium’s key takeaways, here’s our summary of Professor Li Wei’s take on the topic.

Prof. Li Wei is the Director and Dean of the Institute of Education (UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society), and he gave a talk that focused on how sociolinguistists and applied linguists can engage in decolonising the curriculum.

Centring participatory practices

Li Wei argues that the social responsibilities of linguists should include not only the analysis of linguistic structures but also the pursuit of social justice through investigating and understanding the interplay of language practices and the social worlds of speakers. As he puts it:

“We are observing participants trying to make sense of their world in a real-life situation. By trying to make sense of them trying to make sense of their lives, we are participating in their social world as well. That is quite an important point: their social world becomes part of ours, and ours becomes part of theirs.”

By simply embarking on a research project, researchers have an influence on (and a responsibility for) the people with whom they work. The process of research should not objectify the communities we study—and researchers should not position themselves at a distance.

This is particularly salient in an era of mobility and superdiversity: as Li Wei puts it, “We see our responsibility as participating in a social debate over the value of multilingualism and over the consequences of a community coming together.”

Prof Li Wei in a suit jacket is standing behind a long table as he delivers his talk. His hands are steeple as he speaks. Behind him is a projector that shows his slides.

Prof Li Wei delivering his talk.

Acknowledging subjectivity in knowledge production 

Researchers should revisit the tenet that analysis must be objective, contained, and distant. Analysis is not a mere presentation of objective facts existing “out there”. As Li Wei says:

“We are presenting our analysis of what we have observed, which is necessarily subjective, because we all come into our analyses from our own trajectories and backgrounds and ideologies — and we should not be afraid to say that this is my own understanding, this is my interpretation, and to open it up to challenges as well.”

Instead, researchers should be open and explicit about their socio-cultural, political, ideological stance when they present their interpretation and analysis, and, as Li Wei suggests, “invite the reader to participate in our analysis as a social act.”

Rethinking multilingualism as a strength

Can we move beyond merely ‘allowing’ different languages to be used in the classroom?

Li Wei suggests that we should think of different languages not just as additive, but as constitutive, in a shift towards a translanguaging stance:

“The stance we want to move towards is a perspective that views multilingual language learners’ linguistic practices and their racial/ethnic identities together. It’s all integrated, together with the sociolinguistic realities of the community and the educational demands of the school.”

When we label a group of speakers’ practices as “foreign” or “second language” or having “English as an additional language”, it has serious educational consequences in schools, as these names and categories carry specific socio-political connotations beyond simple linguistic labels.

A slide from Prof Li Wei's talk, screencapped from the YouTube feed. It says:University as translanguaging space

Implicit medium-of-instruction policy
What is the language of learning?
Students learning through their own languages: information available to them, not to the lecturers, how do we incorporate that knowledge?

A slide from Prof Li Wei’s talk.

Through approaching teaching as co-learning, we can reset power relations within the classroom and challenge dominant language ideologies.

Additionally, students learn in many different languages beyond the classroom. Li Wei says:

“We tend not to pay any attention to the source of the information they get, or what language they are actually doing the learning in outside the lecture theatre. How can we incorporate that knowledge that is gained through different languages and different cultural contexts into the teaching and learning in the university?”

Li Wei’s talk was followed by Alison Phipps’s presentation on outside-of-the-box learning practices such as how students can get good marks through raiding charity shops, why researchers should make fools of themselves, and how to hold a bowl of tears.

If you’re intrigued, keep an eye out for the second part of our blog post series, featuring summaries of speakers’ key points, by subscribing to our blog (link on the right!) or follow us on Twitter.

Want to listen to Prof. Li Wei’s full talk, titled “Participatory Linguistics in the Translanguaging Framework: Towards decolonising linguistics and language education”? Click here to check it out.

This symposium was organised by Dr Jelena Ćalić and Dr Eszter Tarsoly on behalf of the PROLang (Policy, Research and Outreach for Language-based area studies) Research Group in collaboration with UCL Institute of Advanced Studies, with the support of CHE’s Education Enhancement Grant. This post was written by Kellynn Wee.