At a time when we’re working for greater tolerance and diversity in society, UK universities should double their efforts to understand and celebrate their multilingual students who, according to the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), represent 22% of the students in UK.
Yet, many universities do very little to integrate the linguistic capital of their multilingual students to the daily communication practices of the institution and their curricular agenda, despite many calling themselves “multilingual universities”.
Students multilingual resources do have a role to play in the daily linguistic practices of universities, and in the curriculum of higher education. Only by recognising and celebrating multilingualism will we be able to achieve a truly decolonised and diverse teaching and learning agenda and environment. And there are many ways of making sure this takes place in very simple and inclusive ways. I will be discussing this in my following posts.
If you’d like to read more on my take on multilingual recognition and inclusion in higher education, I wrote a piece for the International Journal of Multilingualism https://lnkd.in/ecNGXF5a
