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.

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:

 

 

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.

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?”

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:

• Let’s re-centre multilingual communities in our classrooms and research: a summary of Prof. Li Wei’s talk
• How students learn German through charity shop raids: a summary of Prof. Alison Phipps’s talk

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.