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.”

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.

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.