Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research 9781800410909

Table of contents :
Contents
Contributors
1 Introduction: The Nexus of Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research
2 Translanguaging, Epistemological Decentring and Power: A Study of Students’ Perspectives and Learning
3 More Languages for More Students: Practice, Ideology and Management
4 Glimpses Into the ‘Language Galaxy’ of International Universities: International Students’ Multilingual and Translanguaging Experiences and Strategies at a Top Finnish University
5 Fostering Students’ Decentring and Multiperspectivity: A Cross-Discussion on Translanguaging as a Plurilingual Tool in Higher Education
6 Teaching the Conflicts in American Foreign Language Education
7 On Matrouzity: Translanguaging and Decentring Plurilingual Practices in Morocco
8 Foreign Language Learning ‘in the Wild’ and Epistemological Decentering
9 Strategies of Decentring in Translingual Research: Reflections on a Research Project
10 Student Testimonies: Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring from a Student Perspective
Appendix: Abstracts of Chapters 2-9. A Courtesy for Selective Readers
Author Index
Subject Index

Citation preview

Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research

LANGUAGES FOR INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION AND EDUCATION Series Editors: Michael Byram, University of Durham, UK and Anthony J. Liddicoat, University of Warwick, UK The overall aim of this series is to publish books which will ultimately inform learning and teaching, but whose primary focus is on the analysis of intercultural relationships, whether in textual form or in people’s experience. There will also be books which deal directly with pedagogy, with the relationships between language learning and cultural learning, between processes inside the classroom and beyond. They will all have in common a concern with the relationship between language and culture, and the development of intercultural communicative competence. All books in this series are externally peer-reviewed. Full details of all the books in this series and of all our other publications can be found on http://www.multilingual-matters.com, or by writing to Multilingual Matters, St Nicholas House, 31–34 High Street, Bristol, BS1 2AW, UK.

LANGUAGES FOR INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION AND EDUCATION: 39

Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research Edited by Heidi Bojsen, Petra Daryai-Hansen, Anne Holmen and Karen Risager

MULTILINGUAL MATTERS Bristol • Jackson

DOI https://doi.org/10.21832/BOJSEN0893 Names: Bojsen, Heidi, editor. | Daryai-Hansen, Petra, editor. | Holmen, Anne, editor. | Risager, Karen, editor. Title: Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research/ Edited by Heidi Bojsen, Petra Daryai-Hansen, Anne Holmen and Karen Risager. Description: Bristol; Jackson: Multilingual Matters, [2023] | Series: Languages for Intercultural Communication and Education: 39 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Using data from universities in Asia, Central and North America, Europe and the Maghreb, this book provides examples of the heuristic value of translanguaging and epistemological decentring, and argues that decentring cannot happen until learners are able to identify which sorts of centring dynamics and conditions are salient to their learning”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2022042837 (print) | LCCN 2022042838 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800410886 (paperback) | ISBN 9781800410893 (hardback) | ISBN 9781800410909 (pdf) | ISBN 9781800410916 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Language and education. | Translanguaging (Linguistics) | LCGFT: Essays. Classification: LCC P40.8 .T73 2023 (print) | LCC P40.8 (ebook) | DDC 404/.2--dc23/eng/20221121 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022042837 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022042838 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-13: 978-1-80041-089-3 (hbk) ISBN-13: 978-1-80041-088-6 (pbk) Multilingual Matters UK: St Nicholas House, 31–34 High Street, Bristol, BS1 2AW, UK. USA: Ingram, Jackson, TN, USA. Website: www.multilingual-matters.com Twitter: Multi_Ling_Mat Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/multilingualmatters Blog: www.channelviewpublications.wordpress.com Copyright © 2023 Heidi Bojsen, Petra Daryai-Hansen, Anne Holmen, Karen Risager and the authors of individual chapters. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. The policy of Multilingual Matters/Channel View Publications is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products, made from wood grown in sustainable forests. In the manufacturing process of our books, and to further support our policy, preference is given to printers that have FSC and PEFC Chain of Custody certification. The FSC and/or PEFC logos will appear on those books where full certification has been granted to the printer concerned. Typeset by Nova Techset Private Limited, Bengaluru and Chennai, India. Printed and bound in the UK by the CPI Books Group Ltd.

Contents

Contributors 1

2

3

vii

Introduction: The Nexus of Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research Heidi Bojsen, Petra Daryai-Hansen, Anne Holmen and Karen Risager

1

Translanguaging, Epistemological Decentring and Power: A Study of Students’ Perspectives and Learning Heidi Bojsen

24

More Languages for More Students: Practice, Ideology and Management Marta Kirilova, Anne Holmen and Sanne Larsen

49

4

Glimpses Into the ‘Language Galaxy’ of International Universities: International Students’ Multilingual and Translanguaging Experiences and Strategies at a Top Finnish University 75 Deborah Charlotte Darling and Fred Dervin

5

Fostering Students’ Decentring and Multiperspectivity: A Cross-Discussion on Translanguaging as a Plurilingual Tool in Higher Education Petra Daryai-Hansen, Danièle Moore, Daniel Roy Pearce and Mayo Oyama

6

7

8

Teaching the Conflicts in American Foreign Language Education Rutie Adler, Annamaria Bellezza, Claire Kramsch, Chika Shibahara and Lihua Zhang

100

126

On Matrouzity: Translanguaging and Decentring Plurilingual Practices in Morocco Heidi Bojsen, Joshua Sabih and Khalid Zekri

149

Foreign Language Learning ‘in the Wild’ and Epistemological Decentering Louise Tranekjær

174

v

vi

Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research

9

Strategies of Decentring in Translingual Research: Reflections on a Research Project Karen Risager

10 Student Testimonies: Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring from a Student Perspective Introduced by Heidi Bojsen, Petra Daryai-Hansen, Anne Holmen and Karen Risager Appendix: Abstracts of Chapters 2-9. A Courtesy for Selective Readers Author Index Subject Index

197

221

266 271 273

Contributors

Rutie Adler has taught Hebrew as a foreign language from elementary to advanced levels, biblical and post-biblical Hebrew and Hebrew Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley since 1987. She planned and implemented a Hebrew-learning site ivrit.berkeley.edu that includes film clips and texts, and she authored Zeh Lo Nora: Reference Book for Students of Hebrew (2012). Annamaria Bellezza is a senior lecturer in the Italian Studies Department at UC Berkeley and the recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award. She is the co-author of Prego! An Invitation to Italian (4th edn) and Il Real e il Possibile (1st edn), and she has published on innovative theoretical perspectives and practices in the fields of critical performative and language pedagogies. Her latest article is ‘Developing teacher artistry and performative competence: a pedagogical imperative in the multicultural classroom’ (L2 Journal, 2020). Since 2011 she has been the organizer and director of Words in Action, a multilingual student performance that brings together the Berkeley language community every spring. Heidi Bojsen’s (https://forskning.ruc.dk/en/persons/hbojsen) research in plurilingual learning and communication, and its ties with epistemological decentring, is inspired by the works of Caribbean, Maghrebian and West African intellectuals. See articles https://www.karib.no/articles/10.16993/ karib.83/, https://www.karib.no/articles/abstract/10.16993/karib.20/ and https://muse.jhu.edu/article/525057. With Ismaël Compaoré, Université Thomas Sankara, Burkina Faso, Heidi directs the international research network Media, Security Crises and Youth in West Africa https://internationalresearchnetwork.wordpress.com/ that deals with data retrieved in French and West African languages. In Denmark, she was one of the founders of Roskilde University’s Language Profiles and directs the innovation project CLIL-Pathfinders (2020–2023) that develops CLIL tools and strategies: https://wordpress.com/view/clilstifindere.wordpress.com. Deborah Charlotte Darling’s research focuses on multilingualism in the context of higher education, which includes the themes of language ideologies, internationalisation, minority languages, inclusive and multilingual pedagogies, language education and language policy. vii

viii

Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research

Petra Daryai-Hansen is associate professor and coordinator of cross disciplinary courses and degrees at the Department of English, German and Romance Studies, University of Copenhagen. She has been involved in and has coordinated many Danish, Nordic/Baltic and international projects, e.g. the Language Profi les at Roskilde University. Her main research area is foreign language education with specific focus on plurilingual education, Content and Language Integrated Learning, intercultural education and teacher/student cognition. Fred Dervin is Professor of Multicultural Education at the University of Helsinki (Finland). He is director of the TENSION research group (diversities and interculturality in education). Dervin also holds several distinguished and visiting professorships in Australia, Canada, China, Luxembourg, Malaysia and Sweden. Professor Dervin specializes in intercultural education, the sociology of multiculturalism and student and academic mobility. He has widely published in different languages on identity, the ‘intercultural’ and mobility/migration (over 150 articles and 60 books). His latest books include (all 2022): Fragments in Interculturality: A Reflexive Approach (Springer), Supercriticality and Interculturality (with Tan, Springer) and Interculturality in Teacher Education (Cambridge University Press). Anne Holmen has worked with theoretical and practical aspects of languages-in-education in general and multilingualism in particular since 1980s at several Danish universities. She is now director of the Centre for Internationalisation and Parallel Language Use at the University of Copenhagen. She took part in the fi rst longitudinal Danish study on the development of bilingualism in school-age children (the Koege-project) and in a number of Nordic collaborative projects, including school-related projects in Greenland. Currently, she is involved in implementing the University’s language policy alongside fi nishing a book on translanguaging in a Danish context and a study on heritage language students in university language programs. Marta Kirilova is a tenure track assistant professor at the Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics at the University of Copenhagen. Her research interests include sociolinguistics, language ideology and practice, institutional interaction and multilingualism at the workplace. She was involved in the research project ‘More Languages for More Students’ as a postdoc where she conducted surveys with students and university staff aimed at collecting knowledge about the language skills required to study and work abroad in an increasingly internationalized education environment and job market. Currently, she is part of a large project on interpreter-mediated interaction in the Danish public sector.

Contributors ix

Claire Kramsch is Emerita Professor of German and Affiliate Professor of Education at UC Berkeley. She has published extensively in applied linguistics and foreign language education, especially on the relation of language and culture, multilingualism and language and symbolic power. She is past president of the American and International Association of Applied Linguistics. She is the founder and past director of the Berkeley Language Center that has served as a common rallying point for the five authors of Chapter 6. Sanne Larsen is an assistant professor at the Centre for Internationalisation and Parallel Language Use at the University of Copenhagen. Her work revolves around the roles and uses of languages in higher education, including English medium instruction and integrating content and languages. As a postdoc on ‘More Languages for More Students’, she worked with developing language instructional models tailored to the disciplinary literacy needs of students in different programmes. Currently, she heads a project exploring the foreign language needs of students at different institutions of higher education in Denmark as a basis for developing instructional models responding to those needs. Danièle Moore is a Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada and a Research Director at université Sorbonne Nouvelle. Her research interests in educational sociolinguistics cover the study of plurilingualism in societies, endangered languages and language reclamation, diasporas, language policy, and plurilingual education and curriculum development, with a focus on teacher training. She favours inquiry methods blending visual, narrative, performative, poetic (auto)ethnography, language biographies and participatory action research that engage collaborations between teachers, learners, families, communities and museal institutions, locally and across contexts. Mayo Oyama is a lecturer at Osaka Metropolitan University, Japan. Her research interests include plurilingual education for elementary to university students, specifically with the Éveil aux langues methodology, for which she has developed materials for the Japanese elementary school context, and teacher training. She is the author of the 言語への目覚め活 動：複言語主義に基づく教授法 [Awakening to Languages: A Plurilingual Teaching Methodology] (Kuroshio Shuppan Publishing, 2016). Daniel Roy Pearce is a lecturer in the Faculty of Education, Shitennoji University, Osaka, Japan. He holds a Japanese teachers license for the foreign language subject, has previously taught for five years in Japanese public schools, and is a member of the textbook review committee of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. His

x

Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research

current research interests include teacher collaboration, interdisciplinary plurilingual education, and plurilingualism and linguistic diversity within primarily monolingual contexts. Karen Risager is Professor Emerita in Cultural Encounters, Roskilde University, Denmark. Her research centres on language and intercultural education in a transnational and global perspective. Her publications include: Language and Culture Pedagogy: From a National to a Transnational Paradigm (Multilingual Matters, 2007); ‘The LanguageCulture Nexus in Transnational Perspective’ in Routledge Handbook of Language and Culture (F. Sharifian (ed.), Routledge, 2015), Researching Identity and Interculturality (F. Dervin (ed.), Routledge, 2015), Representations of the World in Language Textbooks (Multilingual Matters, 2018) and ‘Research timeline: Analysing culture in language learning materials’ (Language Teaching, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1017/ S0261444822000143). Joshua Sabih (https://forskning.ruc.dk/en/persons/sabih) is a crossdisciplinary scholar in inter-religious, language/cultural encounters, world literature, political theologies and postcolonial historiographies. He is the author of Japheth ben Ali’s Book of Jeremiah: A Critical Edition and Linguistic Analysis of the Judaeo-Arabic Translation (Equinox Publishing, 2009) and ‘Trans-textual Postmodernity: Hassan Najmís Novel: Gīrtrūd, Gertrude Steińs The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and Anaïs Nińs The Dairy of Anaïs Nin’ in New Geographies: Texts and Contexts in Modern Arabic Literature (edited by Allen et al., 2018) and ‘GOD IS TELLING US SOMETHING: Rabbi Amnon Yitzhak’s Pesher and Socio-Political Pantheism of Coronavirus’ (Tidsskrift for Islamforskning, 2021). Chika Shibahara has been teaching Japanese at UC Berkeley since 1993. Her academic interests include symbolic competence, intercultural communicative competence, multilingualism and teaching language through films and literature. She served as Academic Outreach Coordinator for the Berkeley Language Center from 2014 to 2017. She co-authored with Mark Kaiser ‘Film as Source Material in Advanced Foreign Language Classes’ (L2 Journal, 2014) and with Claire Kramsch (in Japanese) ‘Experiencing Japan in the Japanese classroom: A lesson plan using fi lm’ in State-of-the Art in Language Education: Rewriting Expert Knowledge (Hitsuji Shobo, 2021). Louise Tranekjær’s research focuses on global citizenship, language learning and cultural encounters within educational and workplace settings. She has been the head of the Language Profi le programme at Roskilde University and is editor in chief of the journal Sprogforum.

Contributors xi

Khalid Zekri is professor of literature at the University of Meknes and co-founder of the cultural and postcolonial studies team at the same university. He is the winner of the Moroccan Book Prize in Social Sciences in 2019. He recently published a study entitled Arab Modernities (2018) and co-edited Hybridations and Narrative Tensions in the Maghreb and SubSaharan Africa (2020). Lihua Zhang is a senior lecturer of Chinese at UC Berkeley. She teaches Chinese both as a foreign language and as a heritage language from elementary to advanced levels. She has published on Chinese heritage language education, the use of film in the Chinese curriculum and computer-assisted learning. She has authored A Contrasted Study of Aspectuality in German, English, and Chinese (1995) and co-authored with Claire Kramsch The Multilingual Instructor (2018).

1 Introduction: The Nexus of Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research Heidi Bojsen, Petra Daryai-Hansen, Anne Holmen and Karen Risager

1 Two Trends in Higher Education Research: The Plurality of Languages and of Epistemologies

The reflections on the notions of ‘translanguaging’ and ‘epistemological decentring’, which appear in this volume, are in conversation with two major trends in modern research on language and education. One trend is the emerging focus on multilingualism in what used to be contexts dominated by a monolingual habitus, captured in key concepts like plurilingual pedagogies, language as heteroglossia, and translanguaging (e.g. Council of Europe, 2020; García et al., 2017; May, 2014). The abundance of terms that describe the pluralities of languages in various language practices has been mapped out and discussed by Marshall and Moore as they note a ‘terminological switch [that] has differentiated multilingualism (the study of societal contact) from plurilingualism (the study of individuals’ repertoires and agency in several languages) (Beacco & Byram, 2007; Gajo, 2014; Moore & Gajo, 2009)’ (Marshall & Moore, 2018: 21). This trend refers to a genealogy as old as the university. In different parts of the world, universities and other institutions of higher education have historically hosted encounters between a plurality of spoken languages and a smaller repertoire of written languages or languages of knowledge and learning used by the institutions. The use of Latin as the language of learning in European universities, and the use of the Arabic alphabet to transcribe West African languages in the university of Timbuktu in the 12th century, are examples of how 1

2

Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research

the question of plurilingualism and the ability to retrieve, process and communicate knowledge across different language forms have been part of higher education institutions from the start (Kane, 2017; de RidderSymoens & Rüegg, 2003). The founding of universities happened in an ongoing negotiation, inspiration, contestation and adaptation to various powerful knowledge forms, different epistemologies, founded in different variations of religious, political and cultural belief systems and practices. The other trend is the emphasis on epistemological decentring in contemporary anthropology (Agier, 2016), according to which traditional mind-sets are being deconstructed and revalidated in research and education. This trend has an interdisciplinary and plurilingual itinerary of critical research on language, epistemology and education in colonial and postcolonial contexts, which have been present in fields such as literature, sociology and cultural studies for half a century or more such as Peau noire, masques blancs (1952) by Frantz Fanon, Une si longue lettre (1971) by Marima Bâ, La blessure du nom propre (1974) d’Abdelkhébir Khatibi, Orientalism (1978) by Edward Said, Le Discours antillais (1981) by Édouard Glissant, Decolonising the Mind (1986) by Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, La colonisation de l’imaginaire (1988) by Serge Gruzinski, not to forget the thoughtprovoking Invention of women, (1997) by Oyèrónké Oyěwùmí. In addition to Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha and numerous others have emphasized the need to take account of colonial language hierarchies and colonial epistemological legacies. The epistemological implications of this began to enter other fields under the name of postcolonial theory in the 1980s and 1990s. In the 1990s and 2000s, the works of Walter Mignolo and Boaventure de Souza Santos picked up on the works of Enriques Dussel and many others to carve out the field known as decolonial studies today. This trajectory of the second trend is relevant for foreign language education because its archive contains numerous reflections and theorizations on cultural and linguistic encounters that entail different forms of translanguaging and decentring in education and research that are relevant for scholars who work in this field. It demonstrates that education is always also a language education, as learners must acquire new knowledge and skills via language and, often, a new vocabulary and discourses. Yet, learners may be situated very differently when engaging in this task. Some of the chapters in this volume will refer to both trends while others will focus mostly on one of the two. In Section 2 of our introduction, we will provide a brief framing of how the two trends are at work in contexts where English is present as a language of internationalization. In Sections 3 and 4, we will lay out how the contributors and we have understood and worked with the notions of ‘translanguaging’ and ‘decentring’. We have invited authors to reflect on how they understand and

Introduction: The Nexus of Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring

3

deploy the concepts of ‘translanguaging’ and ‘epistemological decentring’ in relation to the context of their particular study and data. This means that readers will fi nd both differences and transversal tendencies across the chapters in the defi nitions and even spelling of the two. In order to perform what we preach as editors, we have chosen not to erase this diversity in the name of harmonization, allowing readers to encounter and assess the diversity of defi nitions and analytical deployment. Sections 3 and 4 will reveal that the concepts of translanguaging and that of epistemological decentring are often intertwined. This may be the case, both when they refer to a theoretical position and when they refer to a particular practice or event. In Sections 5 and 6, we situate this nexus between translanguaging and epistemological decentring in relation to current conversations about heuristic diversity and the struggle for power (understood as agency and visibility) in higher education and research. In doing so, we give priority to positions, questions and results that appear in the chapters of this book. In Section 7, we present our reflections on the context in which this collective work came about. The editors are based in two Danish localities, but are in constant relational translanguaging and decentring efforts with other languages and regions in the world. Next, Section 8 offers a brief introduction to the Language Profi les at Roskilde University and the thoughts behind publishing essays by seven students in Chapter 10, while Section 9 provides an overview of the other student voices from other parts of the world that appear in other chapters. In Section 10, we conclude the introduction with a brief account of the general and specific contents of the different chapters. 2 Internationalization and the Dominance of English

Today, referring to internationalization as a strategic aim, many universities in non-Anglophone settings introduce English as Medium of Instruction and seek to attract more international students as well as international members to their faculty (Dimova & Kling, 2020). As a consequence of demographic change, the workplace and study environment of universities have become clearer sites of multilingualism (Preece, 2011), while simultaneously, English is used to a far wider extent as lingua franca. However, the plurilingualism of faculty, staff and students and the curricular and research resources in other languages than English and the national language(s), are often either overlooked in institutional policies or deliberately contained as it will appear in some of the chapters that follow. Such languages can be other standard languages than those endorsed by the institution via language policies and curricula, but they can also be languages that are overlooked or stigmatized in parts of the surrounding society such as indigenous languages in the Americas and in Scandinavia, immigrant languages in Europe, African-American English

4

Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research

in an American context, and languages that may be spoken by a majority of the population but without any recognized and known orthography for the majority of speakers as in many countries in Maghrebian and SubSaharan Africa. This complexity is occluded in many countries. The university is often presented as either a monolingual, national institution or as a bilingual, transnational institution. A growing tension between the two institutional models within the same university may also occur (Mortensen & Haberland, 2012; Van Leuwen, 2004). An institutional embracing of the actual plurality of languages that are affiliated with the people and surrounding societies remains absent beyond, perhaps, the research of certain faculty members. 3 Translanguaging

The word ‘translanguaging’ is the English translation of the Welsh word trawsieithu. This term was coined by Cen Williams (1996) as he developed classes where students would change between Welsh and English as part of their learning process. García and Kleyn (2016) and Li Wei (2011, 2018) have developed the notion to describe speakers’ language repertoire and cognitive work across and drawing on different language forms (see also García & Li Wei, 2014). Canagarajah (2013a, 2013b) has worked extensively on the written forms of this and has underlined that currently translanguaging refers both to such practices of using multiple language forms without upholding distinct separations and to a theoretical understanding of language and languaging as going beyond the confi nements of particular language forms. This is also how the notion is distinct from codeswitching and codemeshing. How do we understand the notion of translanguaging in this volume? In Chapter 9, Risager pursues this trajectory by showing how translanguaging research is also multimodal as her cognitive work across various languages also works across the practice of reading, thinking and writing in various languages simultaneously as well as sequentially. As a theoretical positioning, translanguaging insists that language in its occurrence in the world is always dynamic and constantly evolving. This goes for written language as well, as it entails the flow between sender’s intentions and recipients’ interpretation and understanding. In Chapter 5, Daryai-Hansen, Moore, Pearce and Oyama provide examples of ‘translingual pedagogies’ that ‘emphasize(s) fluidity and passage, disruption of borders and transformations of identities’ (p. 103 in this volume). Thus, the ‘trans-’ in translanguaging refers to a flow across distinctions between social languages and varieties and across distinctions between language forms such as between Arabic, English, Finnish or Japanese. Normann Jørgensen’s notion of languaging underlines this dynamic (Jørgensen, 2008). The plurality of sociolects and many regional varieties within perceived language forms provide ample evidence for the

Introduction: The Nexus of Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring

5

pertinence of this argument, not to forget the many different uses and flows of words or semes across language forms. At times, this dynamic unfolds in contexts where speakers and languaging practices are situated unevenly in the predominant social system. This can produce different strategies of resistance, detouring and containment (Glissant, 1981). In Chapter 2, Bojsen draws on Glissant’s notions of forced and free poetics and on Bakhtin’s notions of the centripetal and centrifugal to develop this aspect. Darling and Dervin discuss translanguaging practices that happen ‘behind the scenes’ in the University of Helsinki in Chapter 4, while Kirilova, Holmen and Larsen in Chapter 3 document translingual needs and practices among students that lie beyond the official policies at the University of Copenhagen. Bojsen, Sabih and Zekri document a pervasive translanguaging practice of Darija, Fusha, French and English in Moroccan universities in Chapter 7. Tranekjær (Chapter 8) lets us see how English-speaking expats in Costa Rica manoeuvre in translanguaging practices that uphold the hierarchies established in the context of higher education. Different scholars have already documented the advantages of sustaining plurilingual learning and translanguaging in foreign language programmes as well as in other programmes in higher education. One benefit is the implication of more perspectives and modalities of conceptualization with the academic subject. Another benefit is that such plurality may include and speak to a larger number of lifeworlds and languages of students (Daryai-Hansen & Kirilova, 2019; Gajo, 2007; Marshall & Moore, 2018). This perspective is developed in Chapter 6 by Adler et al. as they connect translanguaging to Kramsch’ notion of symbolic competence (Kramsch, 2006, 2009) in an analysis of translanguaging in foreign language education classrooms that deal with politically sensitive issues. García (2009) emphasizes the cognitive dimension and benefit in allowing students to deploy their entire language repertoire and to encourage them to perceive it as one coherent toolbox. This can also be mobilized in various study programmes in higher education, both in foreign language education as well as in other programmes that seek to enhance students’ ability to undertake plurilingual academic work (Bojsen, 2015, 2018; Daryai-Hansen & Kirilova, 2019). The student essays in Chapter 10 will provide several examples of this. 4 Epistemological Decentring

In this volume, the notion of epistemology refers to the conceptual apparatus deployed within an academic discipline, both internally among its scholars and in the communication with students and other agents outside of university, when communicating the knowledge it produces. A conceptual apparatus is here to be understood as the cluster and network of vocabulary, key concepts, argumentative styles, registers and

6

Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research

practices, methodologies and strategies deployed in transforming the complexity of the world around us into ‘data’ and text, from which we may derive ‘knowledge’, ‘truth’ and news questions to be investigated. As such, epistemologies are contextual, historical and constantly evolving due to inputs not only from scholars’ and students’ work but also due to pressure and support, alliances and contestations from agents, ideas and events outside of the universities. Some disciplines work with the notion of personal epistemology, particularly in relation to students’ learning process and journey from the personal to the academic epistemology of a given discipline. However, this volume has a different approach as it focuses specifically on the nexus between translanguaging and those practices, structures and ideas that produce epistemological centres and normativities within higher education institutions in different parts of the world. Indeed, let us go back to Williams’ classroom in Wales and ask: ‘Which is the epistemological centre?’ One could argue that it is the conceptual apparatus conveyed via the English language and its ties with the powerful institutions of the United Kingdom, in which Wales remains a modest player. However, if we decentre ourselves to students’ lifeworlds and everyday practices in Wales, Welsh languaging and conceptualization may have been the epistemological centre of at least part of their subjectivities. Just as translanguaging inevitably entails identifying languages, whose boundaries are then questioned or transcended, epistemological decentring entails identifying centres, possible alternatives and the tensions and/or continuum between them. In Chapter 3, Kirilova et al. defi ne decentring as a ‘linguistic practice through the combined perspective of translingual practices (Canagarajah, 2018) and disciplinary literacies (Airey, 2011)’ (p. 50 in this volume), while recognizing the legacy from psychology (Piaget, 1962), (post)colonial scholarship (Said, 1993) and identity studies (Romero, 2017). For them and for Daryai-Hansen et al. (Chapter 5), epistemological decentring refers to the ability to consider an alternative meaning and point of view in a given situation. As several chapters will describe, epistemological decentring in the context of higher education and research also entails the ability to understand flows and relations of power between different ways of producing, modifying or countering meanings and perspectives. For Darling and Dervin (Chapter 4) ‘decentring refers to moments when multilingual speakers start taking (implicit and/or explicit) steps to disrupt hegemonic language practices and to enrich the(ir) educational landscape with, for example, discussions around alternative epistemologies through the use of other languages’ (p. 76 in this volume). By this, they address a question that also appears in Bojsen (Chapter 2) and Tranekjær (Chapter 8), as to whether epistemological decentring can only happen if there is ‘use of other languages’ – which can also mean that one discusses key concepts in those languages, without having necessarily a command of the language.

Introduction: The Nexus of Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring

7

However, it appears in all three chapters that drawing on or using other languages is in itself not a guarantee for an epistemological decentring. Bojsen’s data suggest that students’ language biography and experience with a minority language appear to provide them with an advantage and make it easier for them to identify and engage in epistemological decentring and that social and institutional normativities and valorizations impact interaction in the classroom and in student papers. In Chapter 5, Daryai-Hansen et al. draw on Araújo e Sá and MeloPfeifer (2007) in their insistence on multiperspectivity in decentring learning processes and underlining the importance of the multimodality in doing so (Moore et al., 2018). In Chapter 6, Adler et al. argue that ‘to “epistemologically decenter” the teaching of foreign languages means, then, to defamiliarize the very way we acquire, create and use knowledge, both about the world and ourselves, by making borders of all kinds into places of observation and understanding of our increasingly socially and culturally global lives’ (p. 144 in this volume). These defi nitions resonate well with the Maghrebian notion of almatroz that Bojsen, Sabih and Zekri coin as ‘matrouzity’ in English in Chapter 7. The three authors demonstrate how a particular practice of translating and interpreting between Hebrew and Arabic can be used to understand specific aspects of decentring techniques of Moroccan translingual practices in Moroccan universities and society. In these techniques, silence and absence are part of the signifying tools as is the materiality of languaging, be it via the body that speaks, listens or is referred to in the discourse or via the material appearance of the written word, images and ornamentation. It is argued that techniques of matrouzity are applicable in analyses of translanguaging and decentring in other contexts as well. The pertinence of this last claim is supported by the analysis in Chapter 8 by Tranekjær. Inspired by Papastephanou (2012) and Santos (2014), Tranekjær shows how epistemological decentring not only provides multiplicity of perspectives and the competence in manoeuvring but may also provide ‘a lens for investigating the processes of epistemological transformation brought about by foreign language learning, foreign language encounters and processes of social integration and “settling” within the different contexts of learning’ (p. 185 in this volume). This transformation may concern students and learners within university or after graduating, but it may also concern the researcher as described by Risager in Chapter 9. Risager offers the reader a glimpse into her work across languages and cultural contexts from different parts of the world: ‘One can say, though, that the act of decentring implies an inclusion of the other perspective in my own understanding of the world as a researcher, and this inclusion depends on my ability to incorporate other perspectives’ (p. 204 in this volume).

8

Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research

5 Situating the Nexus of Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring

Translanguaging as well as epistemological decentring are notions that resonate with other fields of research that deploy the prefi x ‘trans-’, such as transgender, transcultural, transdisciplinary, transnational, etc. that have been explored in many disciplines for the last four decades at least. One dimension of ‘trans’ studies is an interest in critical analytical investigation of different cultural and social norms and societies. Sometimes this investigation is framed so as to develop certain competences of intercultural communication (Byram, 2021), endorsed by university managements and international institutions. As an example, one can mention the research on intercultural and plurilingual communication and education sparked by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), commissioned by the Council of Europe in the 1990s and further developed in the Companion Volume (Council of Europe, 2020), in order to support nuanced and efficient communication and interaction between linguacultures in Europe (Coste et al., 2009). Both within and beyond this framework, many scholars fi nd in their data the necessity to address issues of social and economic justice or the lack thereof (Preece, 2019). The nexus of translanguaging and epistemological decentring is also becoming more visible in studies of research praxis as such. In many different fields of study, primarily in language studies and studies of education but also in for example anthropology, sociology and studies of migration, there is a growing awareness of the role of languages in the entire research process from the conceptualization of the original idea to the choice of sources and empirical input, literature review, analyses, and the reporting and reception of results. This focus is often referred to as Researching Multilingually (Holmes et al., 2013, 2022; Risager, 2016), and it involves reflections on the translingual and epistemological resources and experiences of all participants, whether they are research leaders, scientific collaborators, possible interviewers and interviewees, translators and interpreters, or others. As we will see in several of the chapters in this book, the question of language hierarchies with the dominance of English in many parts of the world, the question of symbolic competence in navigating between these languages (Kramsch, 2009) and the question of social, racial, religious, gendered and economic background of students are tightly connected with their access to and ability to navigate within and between the languages of learning within and beyond the formal learning spaces of higher education (Phipps, 2019). For millions of scholars and students around the world, the colonial legacy is salient in both the management and structures of their institutions of higher education, in the language policies and practices, in the curricula and deployed and occluded epistemologies.

Introduction: The Nexus of Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring

9

An important dimension of the nexus between translanguaging and epistemological decentring is to unravel the ways this legacy may still be preventing scholars and students from drawing on all potential talents and knowledge productions because knowledge and talents are forced to appear in a few selected languages to fit into particular epistemological templates. These templates may not always be appropriate for the case at hand. As Adler et al. point out in Chapter 6, these and other power-related concerns have been treated in discussions within critical pedagogy (Pennycook, 2019), critical epistemology (Kubota, 2020), critical political awareness (Byram, 2021) and critical reflexivity (Byrd Clark & Dervin, 2014). Our interest in investigating translanguaging and epistemological decentring derives from a wish to ensure heuristic diversity and quality in higher education and research. Working to ensure heuristic diversity and quality means striving for organizations and learning contexts where struggles for influence do not silence valuable and valid knowledge that may emerge from marginalized localities or in unfamiliar forms. This could be in languages and epistemological traditions and forms that remain unknown for the majority or for significant numbers of scholars, students, and their societies. All chapters acknowledge and describe different conceptions of language as normative codes and language forms such as French or Japanese as these conceptions are used by students, scholars, policymakers and other agents in their data. The purpose of the book is not to argue against one or the other perception of language and language practice, but rather to investigate how movements, such as translanguaging, across these strongly held distinctions of languages may or may not be tied up with epistemological decentring in higher education and research. In this endeavour, several authors of this volume are drawing on studies on the dominance of English and on the effects of colonization on higher education (cf. Canagarajah & Gao, 2019; Macedo et al., 2019; Makoni & Pennycook, 2007). Some chapters will address different aspects of how epistemological privilege is tied up with the question of language. In today’s global research communities, English presents itself as a ‘hypercentral’ language (de Swaan, 2001). Nevertheless, thousands of scholars will mainly read, teach, do research, and publish not in English, but rather in supercentral languages such as Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian, Spanish and many other languages. Often both education and research will happen in more than one language. The scholars contributing to the book are based in universities in Canada, Denmark, Finland, Japan, Morocco and the US. Their analyses and reflections on the nexus between translanguaging and epistemological decentring are based on data retrieved from higher education contexts within and outside of the institutions representing five different regions in the world, i.e. East Asia, Europe, North Africa, North and Latin America.

10

Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research

Chapters 1–8 present studies carried out at nano, micro, meso or macro level of the institutional contexts (Beacco et al., 2016). They focus on students and their language practices and beliefs, but also on what Spolsky (2019) refers to as their self-management of their language repertoire and their development of language proficiency. In addition, some of the chapters focus on students’ attitudinal uptake and other responses to the language management of their university setting. The book we present here is in English, yet the chapters draw on data in Arabic (in Fusha and Darija), Danish, English, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese and Spanish, representing different data types and textual genres such as observations, self-reported profi les, focus group and individual interviews, exam papers, novels, poems, policy documents, surveys and reports from meetings. Some chapters address a teacher’s viewpoint, others emphasize a policy or focus on a researcher perspective. Most chapters centre on students’ experiences. The focal points can be categorized into three levels: the nano level of students’ reflections on their learning process and teaching practices, the micro level of classroom interactions, teaching materials, and teachers’ observations and reflections of students’ learning and their own practices as teachers and researchers, and the meso and macro level of institution policies and how these policies are responding to expectations and requirements from ministries, politicians, work places as well as from students and staff. This allows for an emerging picture of transversal conjectures that are part of the conditions of possibility or impossibility for translanguaging and epistemological decentring in higher education. 6 Analysing the Struggle for Power in the Nexus Between Languages, Languaging and Epistemologies as an Ongoing Negotiation

The previous section already suggests that in encounters between languages and epistemologies, the issue of power quickly emerges (Dervin & Simpson, 2021). Which languages and knowledge forms are spoken and used by which agents and institutions in society? Is the knowledge produced in the dominant language necessarily providing us with the best answers to what we set out to accomplish in research and higher education? How may we conceptualize and analyse the power relations that are part of translanguaging processes and of epistemological decentring? And which relations between which agents, institutions, discourses, practices and material artefacts must be included in such analyses? How do languaging power relations tie into other social power relations that may influence learners’ positions such as those pertaining to race, gender, age, ethnicity, religion, etc.? The scholarly work of universities has always entailed encounters, inspiration and/or contestations with knowledge productions and belief

Introduction: The Nexus of Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring

11

systems, including different epistemologies, conceived in different cultures and academic disciplines. Consequently, universities are historically institutions that are dependent on their ability to retrieve, produce, analyse and communicate knowledge between different national language forms and their varieties, between different social languages and academic languages. They have also been dependent on their ability to position themselves as some sort of knowledge centre or point of reference in different societies. Thus, this plurilingual history of knowledge production is embedded in a struggle for power not just for the individual student and teacher (Blommaert & Backus, 2013), but also for the institution. The struggle concerns the privilege to obtain the enunciative position from where you may produce true, legitimate and respected knowledge about the world and categorize that knowledge into different academic disciplines. The epistemology chosen and deployed must participate not only in producing knowledge, but equally in the ensuing process of convincing not only peers and students, but even more importantly, other powerful agents from religious, political and economic centres of power that could otherwise threaten this enunciating status and privilege of the universities. We are not arguing that universities are driven by the desire for power for power’s sake. We are merely drawing attention to a point already laid out by others in much detail (Callon & Latour, 2006; Foucault, 1969) that accessing a privileged position of enunciation, hopefully via the means of the best and most valid argumentation, theorization, and methodology, is dependent on the capacity to communicate with, convince and/ or make alliances with other powerful centres and technologies in our societies. The perception of ‘best and most valid’ is contextual and develops over time. Other scholars have already suggested different examples of such contextual links of pressures and dependencies (Liddicoat, 2016, 2018; Phipps, 2019). From this perspective, translanguaging practices in higher education are, as Mazak (2017) has pointed out, not merely a language ideology, a theory of language use, a pedagogical stance and a set of practices, but a political action through its transformational potential: ‘It changes the world as it continually invents and reinvents languaging practices in a perpetual process of meaning-making’ (Mazak, 2017: 6). Several chapters in this volume are in conversation with the research on language hierarchies and the role of English in transnational research and education discussing the question of parallel monolingualism (Holmen, 2016; Piller, 2016), systematic or spontaneous language gatekeeping (Holmen, 2018) and the many covert ways that translanguaging may still insert itself in new ways. The prevalence of English often means that empirical data and examples derived from English-speaking contexts become dominant in research and theoretical developments and innovations. Translating data, texts, methodology and theoretical discussions from one language to another demands an extra effort as the researcher is

12

Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research

not just translating words, but also mediating between different academic conversations, normative understandings and priorities (Blommaert, 2010; Holmes et al., 2013; Phipps, 2019). A general fi nding across the chapters is that the nexus of translanguaging and epistemological decentring often encompasses a variety of simultaneous interpretations that may not be in harmony. The nexus thus often functions as a site of struggle. This is perhaps partly overlooked even within translanguaging pedagogies and research. Interpretations mostly take the form as struggles when they occur on unequal terms. They often spark strong emotions in speakers as they precede, yet feed into, the process of translation and mediation. Depending on the context, some speakers may fi nd a possible safe-haven in a lingua-culture identity position recognized by the most influential surroundings. In this context, we are grateful for the input from our Arabic-, Hebrew- and Japanese-speaking authors in this volume who have shared their knowledge about the notions of ‘matrouzity’ and ‘omotenashi’. The latter addresses and theorizes how ‘empathy’ may be linked to a dialogic translanguaging and trans-linguacultural practice (Daryai-Hansen et al., Chapter 5 in this volume). The first concept refutes specifically the idea of a stable identity position defi ned by language, ethnicity and religion by focusing on the weaving and embroidery between such parameters (Bojsen et al., Chapter 7 in this volume). We believe that speakers outside of these languages can benefit from drawing on their epistemological conceptualization of this nexus. They identify dynamics and aspects of learners’ translanguaging practices and subjectivity processes as they are grappling with epistemological decentring. As discussed in different chapters in this volume, students, teachers and management of higher education institutions do not always have the tools to address or even acknowledge this crossing between languages and the implications for the learning process and epistemological centring or decentring. Or, if the issue is acknowledged, plurilingualism is often sought to be domesticated or centred around a few selected languages. A fi nding that comes across in several chapters is the marginalized, ignored or at times silent and forgotten presence of plurilingualism and translanguaging, sometimes even to those who do in fact deploy less prestigious (in the situation) languages. In Chapter 7, Bojsen, Sabih and Zekri draw forth Abdelkébir Khatibi’s notion of ‘bilangue’ (1983) as a proposition to theorize and study this phenomenon, and in her introductory chapter, Bojsen proposes Édouard Glissant’s distinction between a free and forced poetics (Glissant, 1976, 1981), drawn from his study of sociolinguistic practices and conditions in Martinique to describe the presence and meaning production of ‘silent’ or marginalized languaging. His concepts remind us that qualifying something as silent must beget the questions ‘Silent to whom? From which perspective and epistemological centre?’ In Chapter 4, Darling and Dervin pursue this question as they

Introduction: The Nexus of Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring

13

document an unacknowledged plurilingual practice among students at Helsinki University. In Chapter 6, Adler et al. describe their pervasive didactic classroom work that enables students from both majority and minority language backgrounds to understand and navigate in decentring perspectives in a highly tense and politicized context via translanguaging practices. In a special thematic issue of Journal of Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice (2022), Kramsch’s discussion on the distinctions between professionalism and engagement (Kramsch, 2022) is based on the work in Chapter 6, and the responses by Block, Byram, Chun, Dervin, Gray and Yuan in the same issue are a crucial contribution to our discussion of the negotiation of power positioning in translanguaging and decentring practices in higher education and research. 7 Research from a Peripheral Position in the Global North?

The editors of this volume are all currently based in Danish universities and the volume contains and discusses essays written by 6 former students in one of those universities while 8 out of the 19 scholars in the volume reside in Denmark. Does this mean that the work is per se Scandinavian and peripheral within the Global North? Working in a relatively small national language area, the vast majority of our research is published in English, and for some of us, and to a lesser extent, in French and German in order to participate in a transnational academic conversation. Some of us readily teach in those same languages in addition to Danish as part of our work, as do many of our colleagues. All our academic work, be it on translanguaging and epistemological decentring or other issues, takes place in a constant conversation with texts, scholars, students, and a diversity of other people from different parts of the world in many different languages. We do not aim, or believe it would be pertinent, to define a particular Danish or Nordic posture in relation to translanguaging and epistemological decentring on this basis. However, our context may help to call attention to the characteristics of those localities where faculty, staff and students are obliged to work in a foreign language constantly or for certain tasks. Here, it is important to distinguish between higher education and research in a post-colonial locality and other contexts just as it is relevant to distinguish between contexts where most people’s first languages are not taught in schools and only few know their orthography if such exists. Our interest in translanguaging and epistemological decentring has been inspired by research, observations of translanguaging and epistemological diversity in different parts of the world, in our societies and by our work with Danish and international students in a Nordic context as well as in other parts of the world and in various languages. Some of us have more than one fi rst language and have lived and worked for long periods of time in different countries and languages.

14

Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research

Most texts that students meet in Danish universities, except for foreign language programmes, are in English even if the classes are held in Danish. Teachers are expected to publish internationally (i.e. in English) regularly. This is not because of a colonial past or because the national language is not taught in schools or does not have an orthography as may be the case in countries with a colonial past, but because the language area is so small that it is obligatory as a scholar and student that you move beyond your national language and cultural area in your learning, teaching, and research. When we have worked abroad, we have observed that this condition is unknown for many scholars and students in countries such as France or the USA. In Nordic countries, the sought balance between English and the national language(s) is often referred to as a situation of parallel language use (Holmen, 2016). Even if languages other than English and the national language(s) are relevant as sources in research and education, as well as core elements in the learning environment and for each individual student, Holmen has documented that students having other fi rst languages than Danish in Denmark tend to silence their plurilingualism in the Danish educational system (2014). This is because plurilingualism beyond the established parallel language use is potentially and at times openly stigmatized (Holmen, 2014; Bojsen, 2018; Bojsen, Chapter 2 in this volume). Translation, multimodal codeswitching, recontextualization of given knowledge, semantic work needed for interpretation and decentring etc. are all integral elements in learning processes. For us as editors of this volume, the mediating role of languages in general (Council of Europe, 2020) – and the national language(s) in particular and languages other than English – for learning purposes is what makes the nexus between translanguaging and decentring relevant and highly innovative in all the local educational contexts. As the examples mentioned above suggest, the mediating role that a language may fulfi l depends on a variety of contextual parameters. As it is the case for most scholars in the Nordic countries, the majority of the texts we read are firstly in English, next in other languages. This position makes it tempting to stay intellectually comfortable, perhaps even ‘lazy’ as Santos would say (2014) within the Anglophone sphere, even more so as other languages are not readily appreciated by institutional policies. Yet, as we all have kept working in and with texts, students, scholars and other partners from other languages and regions in the world, we have tried to translate this diversity into a teaching practice in our institutions in different forms, providing students with insights and competencies in working plurilingually, while decentring their perspective from the parallel monolingualism in which they would be immersed in most of the classes. In Denmark, both the University of Copenhagen and Roskilde University have been involved in developing extra-curricular courses that

Introduction: The Nexus of Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring

15

aim to help students use one or more of their foreign languages in their academic learning. Inspired by curricular innovations and studies by Karen Risager, Hartmut Haberland and other colleagues at Roskilde University, Heidi Bojsen and Petra Daryai-Hansen conceived and launched extra-curricular classes, referred to as the Language Profiles, in French and German in 2012. Here, we set out to deploy translanguaging and CLIL (Content Language Integrated Learning) (Coyle et al., 2010; Holmen, 2020) as explicit components and didactic strategies in close cooperation with Risager, Haberland, colleagues and students (Bojsen, 2015; Daryai-Hansen et al., 2018). In 2014, a language profi le in Spanish started up also, due to student demand under Petra Daryai-Hansen’s leadership of the programme (Daryai-Hansen et al., 2015). Later Louise Tranekjær, author of a chapter in this volume, took over as leader of the Language Profi les. It was under her, and also under the leadership of Julia Suárez-Krabbe, that the programme began working more systematically with epistemological diversity and decentring, an issue which had hitherto been only implicitly present (Hansen & Suárez-Krabbe, 2018; Tranekjær, 2018). The courses were taught in a Nordic university, yet a crucial theoretical underpinning has come from Glissant’s notion ‘Poetics of Relation’ (1981, 1990) and from Mignolo’s concept of ‘pluriversality’ (1995; Mignolo & Walsh, 2018) as an epistemological decentring from ‘universality’. Retrospectively and inspired by Risager’s reflections in Chapter 9 about what we as scholars know of languages and the social contexts that we work on and with, we can appreciate that some of us not only read French and Spanish, but have also travelled or lived in Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas and have spoken to people about the role of Creole and the epistemological concepts in indigenous belief systems and languages. Chapter 10 presents a number of essays, written by former Language Profi le students at Roskilde University, about their journey when learning a foreign language in Denmark, Canada, France and Germany. We are convinced that their testimonies on bilingual identities, differences in language policies seen from a student’s perspective, the role of social context for student’s motivation and cognitive thriving, etc. may be of interest to readers from different parts of the world and from a variety of disciplines. Several of the chapters refer to these essays as part of their analysis or will present comparable data with student voices from other countries and regions in the world. In the beginning of this section, we asked whether the use of essays written by students based in Denmark and the number of contributors would mean that the work is Scandinavian or peripheral with the Global North. We invite the reader to deploy a different epistemological frame and to see this collective work with scholars and student voices from five regions in the world as an example of what Glissant calls a Place (Lieu) (1981, 1990).

16

Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research

Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari (1976), Glissant argues against the territorial obsession with fi xed boundaries and distinctions between identities conceived as root-based, languages and land areas. Instead, he underlines the value of identity and languages as rhizomatic, the value in working on and in our relations with the place where we may reside, the languages we speak, as well as with other places in the world and with languages that we may not speak or understand. It has been an objective for everyone involved in this project to turn their geographical, cultural and social locality into such a Glissantian Place. We will leave it up to the reader to assess to what extent we have succeeded. 8 On the Roskilde Language Profiles and the Role of the Student Essays in this Volume

The originality of the Language Profi les at Roskilde University was that the courses would focus on one of the students’ second or third foreign languages, i.e. initially German or French. In addition to developing their academic proficiency in the chosen language, the aim of the programme was to teach students strategies to retrieve, understand and use empirical knowledge and research in that language while discussing relations to their curricula, syllabus and readings in human and social sciences, which was almost entirely in Danish and English. None of the students was taking a degree in foreign languages. The first generation of Language Profile students were very involved in the development of content, pedagogy and didactic strategies of the programme. In addition to open discussions among themselves and with teachers, they were asked to fill out forms after each class, stating what had worked well in the class, what had not worked well and suggestions for change or additions. The forms were anonymous. An electronic survey was also distributed during the first year. In 2013, a small group of students accepted an invitation to write an essay in their fi rst language, i.e. Danish about their learning journey with the language and the Language Profi les. Quite a number of students had used the programme to prepare for a stay abroad as exchange students and wrote about that. Others used the invitation to reflect on their language biography and their outlook on the linguaculture of their Profile Language. The result was a collection of highly interesting testimonies about students’ learning process and reflections on combining foreign language learning and translanguaging with academic work in different social and academic contexts. They provide nuanced insights about the relation between intraand extra-institutional learning spaces, students’ cognitive processes in plurilingual learning, the significance of social, cultural and language hierarchies inside and outside of the classroom, not to forget the element of interpretation, translation and mediation between languages and epistemological normativities (Bojsen, 2015, 2018; Daryai-Hansen et al., 2015, 2017).

Introduction: The Nexus of Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring

17

The essays were published in Danish in 2018 (Bojsen, 2018) and Chapter 10 of the present volume presents a selected number of these essays translated into English as they provide vivid testimonies of how translanguaging and epistemological decentring are experienced, analysed and performed from a student perspective. We believe that these essays represent valuable materials for both students and scholars from other parts of the world. The authors of the present volume have all read and reflected on the translated essays. Some have used them as inspiration to identify which sort of student group, learning, research or policy issue in their own universities could supplement aspects of the testimonies from the Roskilde students. Others have engaged more directly with the student essays in comparative or relational analyses with other data. In this way, the essays have already resonated with the group of authors in this volume as we believe they can do with our readers. 9 Other Student Voices in the Volume: Denmark, Finland, Japan, Morocco and the USA

In addition to the chapter with student essays, student voices also appear in several other chapters in this volume. They are interviewed, take part in surveys and write about their experience with language use and language learning. In Chapter 2, Bojsen studies students’ exam papers in addition to interviews with students from majority and minority language backgrounds in her analysis of how students respond to the plurilingual and pluricultural Roskilde university context in general and the plurilingual and pluricultural curriculum in one of their classes. The 36 pilot projects reported on from the University of Copenhagen by Kirilova et al. in Chapter 3 are based on thorough needs and profi le analyses with students in local study environments across the University supplemented by identification of student language needs and profi les seen from the lecturers’ and legal/bureaucratic perspective. Darling and Dervin (Chapter 4) interviewed students about their experiences of using their languages at university which revealed interesting information about language hierarchies and plurilingual practices and Daryai-Hansen et  al. (Chapter 5) bring in examples of students’ written, graphic and oral responses and productions to plurilingual classes and exercises. Adler et al. (Chapter 6) bring out students’ reflections on both translanguaging and epistemological decentring in classes involving Chinese, Hebrew and Italian thus allowing for a transversal reading across languages. Bojsen et al. (Chapter 7) do not have direct access to students’ voices, but their interviews with Moroccan university teachers provide an interesting glimpse of how Moroccan students’ translanguaging practices are perceived and responded to by teachers as their translanguaging practices are embedded in particular epistemological normativities and struggles.

18

Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research

10 Overview of the Chapters

The nexus between epistemological decentring and translanguaging, that has been reflected on in this introductory chapter, is further conceptualized by Bojsen in Chapter 2, ‘Translanguaging, Epistemological Decentring and Power: A Study of Students’ Perspectives and Learning’, through the analysis of students’ descriptions, reflections and performances at Roskilde University. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on language policy and internationalization in higher education in Denmark and Finland. In ‘More Languages for More Students: Practice, Ideology and Management’, Kirilova, Holmen and Larsen analyse on macro, meso and micro levels a multilingual strategy that has been implemented at the University of Copenhagen, and argue that the inclusion of other languages decenters the hegemonic status of English in higher education. In ‘Glimpses Into the “Language Galaxy” of International Universities: International Students’ Multilingual and Translanguaging Experiences and Strategies at a Top Finnish University’, Darling and Dervin explore international master’s students experiences at the University of Helsinki, and conclude that the students’ non-hegemonic linguistic repertoires are not sufficiently taken into account at the institutional level, and that multilingualism and translanguaging seem mainly to take place as individual ‘underground’ practices. The subsequent four chapters investigate practice examples that intend to promote translanguaging and decentring in higher education in different geographical contexts. In Chapter 5, ‘Fostering Students’ Decentring and Multiperspectivity: A Cross-Discussion on Translanguaging as a Plurilingual Tool in Higher Education’, Daryai-Hansen, Moore, Pearce and Oyama compare student data from a Danish and Japanese context exploring how translanguaging as a plurilingual tool in German and English classes promotes decentring and multiperspectivity. Chapter 6, ‘Teaching the Conflicts in American Foreign Language Education’, focuses on a language teacher perspective. Adler, Bellezza, Kramsch, Shibahara and Zhang compare how cultural, political, and historical conflicts are taught in Chinese, Hebrew, Japanese and Italian classes at UC Berkeley, stressing that this topic contributes to decentre the common representation of foreign language education and to adopt translanguaging as symbolic practice in the foreign language classroom. In Chapter 7, ‘On Matrouzity: Translanguaging and Decentring Plurilingual Practices in Morocco’, Bojsen, Sabih and Zekri present the notion of matrouzity along with other theoretical contributions from Moroccan authors and testimonies from university teachers in Morocco in order to discuss how they may contribute to an analysis of translanguaging practices and epistemological centring and decentring in Moroccan universities and elsewhere. In Chapter 8, ‘Foreign Language Learning “in the Wild” and Epistemological Decentering’, Tranekjær reflects on two language learning

Introduction: The Nexus of Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring

19

contexts: the language profi les at Roskilde University and Spanish as a foreign language in Costa Rica, and analyses how the encounter with ‘the other’ in these contexts promotes not only language and cultural learning, but also epistemological decentring. Chapter 9, ‘Strategies of Decentring in Translingual Research: Reflections on a Research Project’, addresses the concepts of translanguaging and decentring from a research project perspective. In her introspective chapter, Risager reflects on diverse strategies of decentring in a multilingual research project and how the project engages in translingual literacy to cope with epistemological complexity (Risager, 2018, 2021). The language profile students’ essays that several chapters include as data in their analysis, are collected in Chapter 10, ‘Student Testimonies: Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring from a Student Perspective’. Finally, the Appendix provides the reader with brief abstracts of Chapters 2–9, in order to facilitate selective use of the book in research and/or as part of course readings. References Agier, M. (2016) Epistemological decentring: At the root of a contemporary and situational anthropology. Anthropological Theory 16 (1), 22–47. Airey, J. (2011) The disciplinary literacy discussion matrix: A heuristic tool for initiating collaboration in higher education. Across the Disciplines – A Journal of Language, Learning and Academic Writing 8 (3), 1–9. Araújo e Sá, M.H. and Melo-Pfeifer, S. (2007) Online Plurilingual interaction in the development of language awareness. Language Awareness 16, 7–14. https://doi. org/10.2167/la356.0. Bâ, M. (1979) Une si longue lettre. Abidjan, Dakar, Lome: Nouvelles éditions africaines. Beacco, J.C. and Byram, M. (2007) From Linguistic Diversity to Plurilingual Education: Guide for the Development of Language Education Policies in Europe. Strasbourg: Council of Europe. Beacco J.-C., Byram, M., Cavalli, M., Coste, D., Cuenat, M.E., Goullier, F. and Panthier, J. (2016) Guide for the Development and Implementation of Curricula for Plurilingual and Intercultural Education. Strasbourg: Council of Europe. Blommaert, J. (2010) The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blommaert, J. and Backus, A. (2013) Superdiverse repertoires and the individual. In I. de Saint-Georges and J.J. Weber (eds) Multilingualism and Multimodality. Current Challenges for Educational Studies (pp. 11–32). Rotterdam: Sense. Bojsen, H. (ed.) (2018) Hvis Du Ikke Kan Sproget … Om Flersprogethed og Læring på RUC’s Sprogprofiler. Frederiksberg: Samfundslitteratur. Bojsen, H. (2015) The power of students’ subjectivity processes in foreign language acquisition: The example of the language profi les at Roskilde University, Denmark. In S. Durrans, F. Bonnet-Falandry and M. Jones (eds) (Se) Construire dans l’Interlangue. Subjectivity Processes in Interlanguage (pp. 61–72). Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses universitaires de Septentrion. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.septentrion.18628 Byram, M. (2021) Teaching and Assessing Intercultural Communicative Competence: Revisited (2nd edn). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Byrd Clark, J. and Dervin, F. (eds) (2014) Refl exivity in Language and Intercultural Education. Rethinking MultiCulturalism and Interculturality. Abingdon: Routledge.

20

Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research

Callon, M. and Latour, B. (2006) Le grand Léviathan s’apprivoise-t-il? In M. Akrich, M.  Callon and B. Latour (eds) Sociologie de la Traduction. Textes Fondateurs (pp. 11–32). Paris: Presses des Mines de Paris. Canagarajah, S. (ed.) (2013a) Literacy as Translingual Practice. Between Communities and Classrooms. New York: Routledge. Canagarajah, S. (2013b) Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations. New York: Routledge. Canagarajah, S. (2018) Translingual practice as spatial repertoires. Expanding the paradigm beyond structuralist orientations. Applied Linguistics 39 (1), 31–54. Canagarajah, S. and Gao, X. (2019) Taking translingual scholarship farther. English Teaching & Learning 43, 1–3. Coste, D., Moore, D. and Zarate, G. (2009[1997]) Plurilingual and pluricultural competence. Strasbourg: Éditions du Conseil de l’Europe [1st Publication 1997 in French under the title: Compétence plurilingue et pluriculturelle. Vers un cadre européen commun de référence pour l’enseignement et l’apprentissage des langues vivantes: Études préparatoires]. https://rm.coe.int/168069d29b Council of Europe (2020) Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment – Companion Volume. Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing. www.coe.int/lang-cefr Coyle, D., Hood P. and Marsh, D. (2010) CLIL: Content and Language Integrated Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Daryai-Hansen, P., Barfod, S. and Schwarz, L. (2015) Das deutsche Sprachprofi l an der Universität Roskilde. Ein didaktischer Ansatz für den studienbegleitenden Deutschunterricht in Dänemark. Zeitschrift für Interkulturellen Fremdsprachenunterricht 20 (1), 159–180. Daryai-Hansen, P., Barfod, S. and Schwarz, L. (2017) A call for (trans)languaging: The language profi les at Roskilde University. In C.M. Mazak and K.S. Carroll (eds) Translanguaging in Higher Education: Beyond Monolingual Ideologies (pp. 29–49). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. https://doi.org/10.21832/9781783096657-005 Daryai-Hansen, P., Barfod, S. and Schwarz, L. (2018) Perspektiver på Sprogprofi lernes særlige lærings- og undervisningsrum – Om CLIL-tilgangen og den didaktiske trekant. In H. Bojsen (ed.) Hvis du ikke kan sproget … Om fl ersprogethed og læring på RUC’s Sprogprofiler. Frederiksberg: Samfundslitteratur. Daryai-Hansen, P. and Kirilova, M. (2019) Signs of plurilingualism: Current plurilingual countermoves in Danish higher education. International Journal of Bias, Identity and Diversities in Education 4 (2), 43–58. https://doi.org/10.4018/IJBIDE.2019070104 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1976) Rhizomes. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Dervin, F. and Simpson, A. (2021) Interculturality and the Political Within Education. London: Routledge. de Swaan, A. (2001) Words of the World: The Global Language System. Cambridge: Polity Press. Dimova, S. and Kling, J. (eds) (2020) Integrating Content and Language in Multilingual Universities. Cham: Springer. Fanon, F. (1952) Peau noire, Masques Blancs. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Foucault, M. (1969) L’archéologie du savoir. Paris: Éditions de Gallimard. Gajo, L. (2014) From normalization to didactization of multilingualism: European and Francophone research at the crossroads between linguistics and didactics. In J.  Conteh and G. Meier (eds) The Multilingual Turn in Languages Education: Opportunities and Challenges (pp. 113–131). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Gajo, L. (2007) Linguistic knowledge and subject knowledge: How does bilingualism contribute to subject development? International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 10 (5), 563–581. https://doi.org/10.2167/beb460.0 García, O. (2009) Bilingual Education in the 21st Century: A Global Perspective. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell/Wiley.

Introduction: The Nexus of Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring

21

García, O. and Kleyn, T. (eds) (2016) Translanguaging with Multilingual Students: Learning from Classroom Moments. New York: Routledge. García, O. and Li, W. (2014) Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. García, O., Johnson, S.I. and Seltzer, K. (2017) The Translanguaging Classroom. Leveraging Student Bilingualism for Learning. Caslon. Glissant, É. (1976) Free and forced poetics. Alcheringa, 2 (2), 95–101. Glissant, É. (1981) Le discours antillais. Paris: Éditions Gallimard. Glissant, É. (1990) Poétique de la Relation. Paris: Éditions Gallimard. Gruzinski, S. (1988) La colonisation de l'imaginaire: Sociétés indigènes et occidentalisation dans le Mexique espagnol, XVIe-XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Editions Gallimard. Hansen, N.K.L. (2018) Aflæring til læring: Sprog, viden og interkulturel kommunikation i praksis. In H. Bojsen (ed.) Hvis du ikke kan sproget…Om fl ersprogethed og læring på RUC’s sprogprofiler (pp. 167–171). København: Samfundslitteratur. Holmen, A. (2014) ‘Being bilingual means being a foreigner’. Categorizing linguistic diversity among students in Danish Higher Education. Hermes – Journal of Language and Communication in Business 53, 11–24. Holmen, A. (2016) Parallel language strategy. In N. Van Deusen-Scholl (ed.) Second and Foreign Language Education (pp. 301–311). Cham: Springer. Holmen, A. (2018) Shaping a multilingual language policy. Gatekeepers and drivers of change. In M. Siiner, F. Hult and T. Kupisch (eds) Contemporary Perspectives on Language Acquisition Planning (pp. 137–154). Cham: Springer. Holmen, A. (2020) Integrating content and language: The role of other languages than English in international universities. In S. Dimova and J. Kling (eds) Integrating Content and Language in Multilingual Universities (pp. 37–50). Cham: Springer. Holmes, P., Richard F., Andrews, J. and Attia, M. (2013) Researching multilingually: New theoretical and methodological directions. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 23 (3), 285–299. Holmes, P., Reynolds, J. and Ganassin, S. (2022) The Politics of Researching Multilingually. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Jørgensen, J.N. (2008) Languaging. Nine Years of Poly-Lingual Development of Young Turkish-Danish Grade School Students. Copenhagen Studies in Bilingualism, Vol I + II. Copenhagen: Det Humanistiske Fakultet, University of Copenhagen. Kane, O.O. (2017) Beyond Timbuktu. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. https:// doi.org/10.4159/9780674969377 Khatibi, A. (1974) La blessure du nom proper. Paris: Denoël ‘Dossier des Lettres nouvelle’. Khatibi, A (1983) Amour Bilingue. Montpellier: Fata Morgana. Kramsch, C. (2022) Defi ning the political in foreign language teaching – a response to the rejoinders. Journal of Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice 16 (3), 403–412. Kramsch, C. (2006) From communicative competence to symbolic competence. The Modern Language Journal 90 (2), 249–252. Kramsch, C. (2009) The Multilingual Subject. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kubota, R. (2020) Confronting epistemological racism, decolonizing scholarly knowledge: Race and gender in applied linguistics. Applied Linguistics 41 (4), 712–732. Li, W. (2011) Moment analysis and translanguaging space: Discursive construction of identities by multilingual Chinese youth in Britain. Journal of Pragmatics 43, 1222–1235. Li, W. (2018) Translanguaging as a practical theory of language. Applied Linguistics 39 (1), 9–30. Liddicoat, A. (2016) Language planning in universities: teaching, research, and administration. Current Issues in Language Planning 17 (3-4), 231–241. https://doi.org/10.1 080/14664208.2016.1216351 Liddicoat, A. (2018) Language teaching and learning as a transdisciplinary endeavour: Multilingualism and epistemological diversity. AILA Review 31, 14–28. https://doi. org/10.1075/aila.00011.lid

22

Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research

Macedo, D. (ed.) (2019) Decolonizing Foreign Language Education: The Misteaching of English and Other Colonial Languages. New York: Routledge. Makoni, S. and Pennycook, A. (2007) Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Marshall, S. and Moore, D. (2018) Plurilingualism amid the panoply of lingualisms: Addressing critiques and misconceptions in education. International Journal of Multilingualism 15 (1), 19–34. May, S. (2014) The Multillingual Turn: Implications for SLA, TESOL and Bilingual Education. New York: Routledge. Mazak, C.M. (2017) Introduction: Theorizing translanguaging practices in higher education. In C.M. Mazak and K.S. Carroll (eds) Translanguaging in Higher Education: Beyond Monolingual Ideologies (pp. 1–10). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. https://doi. org/10.21832/9781783096657-003 Mignolo, W. (1995) The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, & Colonization. Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press. Mignolo, W. and Walsh, C. (2018) On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Durham: Duke University Press. Moore, D. and Gajo, L. (2009) Introduction–French voices on plurilingualism and pluriculturalism: Theory, significance and perspectives. International Journal of Multilingualism 6 (2), 137–153. Moore, E., Evnitskaya, N. and Ramos-de Robles, S. (2018) Teaching and learning science in linguistically diverse classrooms. Cultural Studies of Science Education 13 (2), 341–352. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11422-016-9783-z Mortensen, J. and Haberland, H. (2012) English. The new Latin of academia? Danish universities as a case. International Journal of Sociology of Language 216, 175–197. Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1986) Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: J. Currey. Oyěwùmí, O. (1997) The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourse. London, Minniapolis: Minniapolis University Press. Papastephanou, M. (2012) Thinking Differently about Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Eccentricity and the Globalized World. Abingdon: Routledge. Pennycook, A. (2019) From translanguaging to translingual activism. In D. Macedo (ed.) Decolonizing Foreign Language Education: The Misteaching of English and Other Colonial Languages (pp.169–185). New York: Routledge. Phipps, A. (2019) Decolonising Multilingualism: Struggles to Decreate. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Piaget, J. (2000 [1962]) Commentary on Vygotsky’s criticisms of Language and thought of the child and Judgement and reasoning in the child. New Ideas in Psychology 18 (2-3), 241–259. Piller, I. (2016) Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice: An Introduction to Applied Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Preece, S. (2011) Universities in the Anglophone centre. Sites of multilingualism. Applied Linguistics Review 2 (1), 121–146. Preece, S. (2019) Elite bilingual identities in higher education in the Anglophone world: The stratification of linguistic diversity and reproduction of socio-economic inequalities in the multilingual student population. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 40 (5), 404–420. de Ridder-Symoens, H. and Rüegg, W. (eds) (2003) A History of the University in Europe: Volume 1, Universities in the Middle Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Risager, K. (2016) Den flersprogede forskningsproces [the multilingual research process]. In M. Kirilova and A. Holmen (eds) Kulturlæring [Culture Learning] (pp. 189–242) = Københavnerstudier i tosprogethed, Vol. C9. Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen.

Introduction: The Nexus of Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring

23

Risager, K. (2006) Language and Culture: Global Flows and Local Complexity. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Risager, K. (2021) Language textbooks: Windows to the world. Language, Culture and Curriculum 34 (2), 119–132. https://doi.org/10.1080/07908318.2020.1797767 Risager, K. (2018) Representations of the World in Language Textbooks. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Romero, Y. (2017) Developing an intersectional framework: Engaging the decenter in language studies. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies 14, 320–346. Said, E. (1978) Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books. Said, E. (1993) Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto & Windus. Santos, B. de Sousa (2014) Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers. Spolsky, B. (2019) A modified and enriched theory of language policy (and management). Language Policy 18, 323–338. Tranekjær, L. (2018) Sprogprofi len i et europæisk og interkulturelt perspektiv. In H. Bojsen (ed.) Hvis du ikke kan sproget…Om fl ersprogethed og læring på RUC’s sprogprofiler (pp. 159–166). København: Samfundslitteratur. Van Leuwen, C. (2004) Multilingual universities in Europe. Models and realities. In R. Wilkinson (ed.) Integrating Content and Language: Meeting the Challenge of a Multilingual Higher Education (pp. 5576–5584). Maastricht: Universitaire Pers. Williams, C. (1996) Secondary education: Teaching in the bilingual situation. In C. Williams, G. Lewis and C. Baker (eds) The Language Policy: Taking Stock (pp. 39–78). Llangefni: CAI.

2 Translanguaging, Epistemological Decentring and Power: A Study of Students’ Perspectives and Learning Heidi Bojsen

1 Introduction: Investigating the Link between Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring

This study sets out to investigate how translanguaging may be connected with epistemological decentring practices in higher education. Part of the motivation for this derives from my work with the supplementary educational programme Language Profiles at Roskilde University, Denmark. The programme started in 2012 and consisted of optional nonEuropean Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) (i.e. no credits) extra-curricular courses for BA students of the humanities and social sciences. Students were offered a learning space in which they developed their language skills in either French or German (from 2014 also Spanish) while working with texts of relevancy for credit yielding courses of their human or social science BA programmes. The teaching in the Language Profiles would deploy translanguaging between Danish, English and the Profi le language as a didactic strategy (Daryai-Hansen et  al., 2017). Students had the opportunity to work with academic subjects, methodologies and theories with relevancy for their academic programme. They also had a large amount of influence on the choice of specific subjects, and on which aspects of the foreign language proficiency they wished to focus on during each of the three Language Profi le semesters. The research question I set out to address here is how we as teachers and researchers may identify, describe and act on the power relations and pressures that have an impact on students’ learning about and possible practice of translanguaging and epistemological decentring. In order to address this question, I worked on three different sets of data. The fi rst set (Table 2.1) concerns the Language Profi le students’ 24

Translanguaging, Epistemological Decentring and Power

25

Table 2.1 Data categories – Language Profile students 2012–2014 Data category Language Profile (2012–2014)

N

Language Profile essays

N = 11

Language Profile students in seminars (French) 2012–2014

N = 28

Language Profile evaluations (German and French)

N = 39

reflections on their learning process as they appear in recorded and transcribed seminars and in the essays written by the students about their work with and in the foreign language (Bojsen, 2018; Chapter 10 in the present volume). The next set (Table 2.2 and Table 2.3) concerns exam papers from six classes in a total of four BA courses in Cultural Encounters Studies at Roskilde University (two courses in English, two courses in Danish) in which the themes of translanguaging, plurilingualism and language hierarchies were addressed. The last set of data consists of focus group interviews with eight students from two of these classes. It should be mentioned that my scholarly training is in cultural studies with a focus on representation of social and cultural meaning in both written texts and oral communication. So, even if I draw on research in applied linguistics and readings of Benveniste, Saussure and Peirce have been part of my scholarly education, I am mostly trained in identifying context-bound positionings and dynamics of enunciation and discursive Table 2.2 Data categories: Students in BA courses 2018–2021 Data category Cultural Encounters’ BA Courses (2018–2021)

N = 285

Danish language class, observation notes, general thematic analysis of exam papers

72

English language class: observation notes, general thematic analysis of exam papers Danish language class, observation notes, in-depth analysis of exam papers.

85 128

Focus group interview with students from one Danish language class with in-depth analysis of exam papers

11

Table 2.3 Exam papers: Language Profile student essays as optional material Total of exam papers

N = 128

Exam papers drawing on Language Profile student essays

76

Exam papers referring to Language Profile combined with theory on subject position and power

39

Exam papers referring to Language Profile combined with discourses about immigrants and refugees in Denmark

15

Exam papers referring to Language Profile combined with gender issues Exam papers referring to Language Profile combined with West Africa Exam papers referring to Language Profile combined with West Africa and discourses on immigrants and refugees in Denmark

1 12 4

26

Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research

formations, inspired by the works of Homi Bhabha, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, among others. My investigation here will focus on the outcome of my choice to make BA students in human and social sciences, who are not Language Profile students, read and discuss essays written by Language Profile students along with other texts about language, power, subjectivity and education. The hypothesis behind this choice was that the essays written by the Language Profile students about their struggle with languages, translanguaging and different dimensions of epistemological decentring would make it easier for other students to relate to and understand the terms and their complexity. The interest of my work for students, teachers and researchers in different parts of the world is twofold. Firstly, it holds an exemplary value in its description of how translanguaging and epistemological decentring may be introduced to students in human and social sciences. Secondly, it introduces theoretical concepts and strategies, borrowed from Mikhail Bakhtin and Édouard Glissant, that may be of use for other scholars who are interested in nuanced analyses of power dynamics and pressures in plurilingual learning contexts in higher education. Before embarking on the analysis, I will present the defi nitions of epistemological decentring and translanguaging used for this study (Section 2), followed by a presentation of the data and of the theoretical concepts that I have deployed in order to identify and investigate different links and power dynamics between the two notions (Section 3). My analysis (Section 4) begins with a presentation of how I and my colleagues have tried to encourage students’ awareness of their language environment in higher education and beyond, followed by a study of how Language Profi le students have developed and connected competences in translanguaging and epistemological decentring. Next, the analysis will investigate how the reflections of the Language Profi le students in their essays may or may not inspire other students of social sciences and the humanities in their development of translanguaging and epistemological decentring competences. The last section of the analysis will focus on what may be learnt by working with translanguaging in both a European and in a West African context, as students in three of the classes studied language hierarchy during French colonialism and in contemporary activist music performances in West Africa as part of the curriculum. The aim of the analysis is to better understand the link between the two notions, translanguaging and epistemological decentring, as they emerge in the students’ learning processes in these particular courses. I am particularly interested in power relations and pressures related to this link, either as students describe them or as I can deduct it from the data. This interest speaks to my function as a teacher and a researcher. Indeed, the answers to how power relations have an impact on translanguaging and epistemological decentring have theoretical and methodological relevancy for my research and teaching practice.

Translanguaging, Epistemological Decentring and Power

27

2 Defining Epistemological Decentring and Translanguaging

In Donald Macedo’s Decolonizing Foreign Language Education: The Misteaching of English and Other Colonial Languages (2019), we fi nd numerous rigorous analyses of how particularly English can function as a vehicle for promoting certain concepts, definitions and research methods at the expense of others that may occur mostly in other language contexts. Consequently, English becomes a component in producing particular epistemological centres (Darling & Dervin, Chapter 4, in this volume; Kramsch, 2019). In their work on translanguaging and plurilingualism, García and Otheguy (2019) are equally concerned with an implicit or explicit reference to English as the central norm, relegating other language practices to a place of exception or minority in the North American context. Marshall and Moore’s convincing overview of the plurality of translanguaging modalities in the classrooms in higher education also suggests that learners may bring in a plurality of epistemological normativities and centres that may or may not appear in the classroom (Marshall & Moore, 2018). In this study, epistemological decentring means that students are presented with different epistemological traditions and learn to reflect on and to navigate across their perceived boundaries. Such traditions can be defi ned as knowledge-producing conceptual normativities that have become common sense in the academic research fields, in the institutions of higher education and in the workplaces where graduates will fi nd employment afterwards. Epistemological decentring is different from transdisciplinary competences by the fact that it does not necessarily refer to two or more disciplines. Rather, epistemological decentring is specifically concerned with how the normativities of knowledge production and conceptual tools are influenced by and have an impact on the sociocultural, economic and geographic localities where they emerge and are used. It may be interdisciplinary but does not have to be. In addition, decentring in this definition deals with relations between different ‘centres’, which I define as discursive formations (Foucault, 1969) or localities of conceptualisations and knowledge production. A crucial component of decentring is to take note of the dynamic and constantly modifiable power relation between these localities. As laid out by Suresh Canagarajah (2013), the concept of translanguaging can refer to a theoretical position on the one hand and, on the other, to a practice of deploying different language forms in one’s language practice whether written or oral as the speaker draws on their entire language repertoire. Together the theoretical and the practical dimensions of translanguaging refer to how people in the world use languages and orientate themselves on the basis of ideas that are represented in those various different languages (Daryai-Hansen et al., 2017; Ferguson, 2003; Jørgensen, 2008; García & Kleyn, 2016; Li Wei, 2010). In its theoretical position, translanguaging breaks away from the structuralist perception of a language form as a closed system. While

28

Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research

acknowledging that such a construction of language still has paramount political, social and educational leverage in many societies and educational settings around the globe, translanguaging, as a theoretical position, is focused on the dynamic changes and flows in language as practice. As such, the constructed boundaries between language forms and social languages are constantly being challenged and/or set aside. The prefi x ‘trans’ underlines this awareness and interest in the occurrences of different varieties of transitions between languages and the deconstruction of structuralist normative defi nitions of where one language begins and another ends. The Language Profi les have worked along the two understandings of translanguaging, described above, since the programme was launched in 2012 (Bojsen, 2018; Daryai-Hansen et al., 2017). 3 Data and Methodology

In the fi rst part of this section (3.1), I will present data sets and tables mentioned in Section 1, while providing more information about the readings and learning objectives of the included courses. I will also explain how the data and methodology have been chosen on the basis of a previous study (Bojsen, 2018) on parts of the data (Table 2.1) and how I now connect the notions of ‘pluricultural capital’ (Zarate, 1998) and ‘symbolic competence’ (Kramsch, 2006) to my investigation of translanguaging and epistemological decentring. In the second part of the section (3.2), I present Risager’s notion of ‘linguaculture’ (Risager, 2006), Bakhtin’s notion of ‘centrepetal’ and ‘centrifugal’ (Bakhtin, 1981) and Glissant’s notions of ‘forced’ and ‘free poetics’ (Glissant, 1976) while explaining how they were chosen as tools in my analytical method. 3.1 The data of the study

The data derived from the Language Profiles consist firstly of the eleven essays written in Danish by the students from the first round of Language Profile students who were enrolled in this class in 2012–2014 (Bojsen, 2018). Chapter 10 in this volume presents seven of these essays in their English translation. In addition, parts of the analysis will draw on recorded and transcribed seminars from the French Language Profile where students would present their work for the semester in French while doing translanguaging into Danish or English. When students enrolled, they had to fill out a form stating their motivations for joining the programme. This and a report that would take into account the extensive evaluation and monitoring of the course during the first 18 months has provided data for triangulating or nuancing parts of the analysis (see Table 2.1). The second part of my analysis is based on data gathered from six classes – three taught in English, three in Danish – from four BA courses

Translanguaging, Epistemological Decentring and Power

29

in the humanities programme of Cultural Encounters, Roskilde University that I taught in the period 2012–2021. The data were collected between 2018 and 2021. Roskilde University works systematically with an interdisciplinary approach. At the time of this study, students enrolled in one faculty were encouraged to consider taking classes from another faculty to make a joint degree that combined subjects from the two main areas. This meant that I had both human and social science students in most of my classes. I was one of three teachers in all courses. These data consist of observation notes, students’ exam papers and transcribed focus group interviews with students (see Table 2.2). In the three classes taught in Danish, students read and responded to the Language Profi le student essays in relation to cultural analysis of different categorisations and power relations during class. In the three classes taught in English, students worked on texts about language hierarchies and mono- and plurilingualism in a Danish and international context of higher education. A learning objective was to provide students with an initial understanding of and rudimentary competence in epistemological decentring. The courses would introduce students to critical discourse analysis, language hierarchies and mono/plurilingual paradigms and the difference between ethno- and constitutional nationalism (Anderson, 1983; Holmen, 2014; Horst & Gitz-Johansen, 2010). Other themes addressed in the courses were gender, race, colonial and postcolonial language hierarchies, and youth activism in the Global South (Hampâté Bâ, 2000; Honwana, 2013; hooks, 2012; Niang, 2016). The examples in the assigned readings focused on Burkina Faso, Mali and Senegal. For the written exam in one of the courses, students had to answer only one out of three questions within 48 hours in about 7–9 pages including bibliography and proper academic referencing. In the Danish-language classes, one single exam question opened up the possibility to combine the Language Profi le essays with other texts from the course, but as an optional choice for answering the question. The question was deliberately made very broad in order to allow students a high degree of freedom in selecting their analytical focal points: ‘Use texts from the course and describe how social ideas and constructions about language, power and social position may be connected with different kinds of imagined collectivities and communities and how such connections may appear in a context of cultural and language encounters’. (My translation of the exam questions formulated in Danish.) In contrast to this openness, several more focused cases had been discussed in class, so if students had been participating, they would not be at a loss. In a previous publication that dealt with the essays and seminar presentations of Language Profi le students (Bojsen, 2018), I had already documented the link between students’ symbolic competence (Kramsch, 2006) and plurilingualism as pluricultural capital (Zarate, 1998) (Table 2.1).

30

Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research

Pluricultural capital refers to the knowledge and ability one has by virtue of one’s education and personal plurilingual biography to get by in various cultures. Symbolic competence refers to the ability to respond analytically and practically to this knowledge. One must be able to function in (i.e. also tolerate) different forms of ambivalence and levels of ambiguity. Symbolic competence also means that you are able to solve complex social tasks while taking account of many different variables and parameters that derive from a cultural and/or linguistic diversity (Kramsch, 2006). For the present study, I coded the essays and transcribed seminar recordings to see if students’ understanding and analysis of translanguaging and epistemological decentring appeared as a pluricultural capital and symbolic competence. In the next two data sets (Table 2.2), I wanted to test to what extent the particular experiences in a setting of foreign language learning as in the Language Profile courses made sense and could inspire fellow students enrolled in the parallel monolingual paradigm courses in either Danish or English. In my coding of the exam papers (Table 2.3), I sought out papers where students referred to the Language Profi le essays (76 papers). Within this category, I identified how students described and reflected on examples of translanguaging and decentring epistemologies, either based only on the essays or by putting the essays in relation to other texts in the course. After this first coding, it became clear that I needed theoretical concepts to describe different aspects that emerged in the exam papers. Firstly, many if not all of the examples referred to dialogic situations or encounters between languages and cultural norms. Secondly, many of the students described situations of struggle and ambivalence. Thirdly, most of the examples described situations between themselves and an educational institution or between other people where there was a clear uneven relation of power or social status. In fact, I realized that the issue of power was crucial. Power was understood as the question of which person, institution or discourse had a (or the most) privileged position that would endow them with a decisive influence on the language practice and the production of meaning in a given situation. I also needed to conceptualise how students would understand and respond to this power dynamic. The examples showed that I needed to work with power as a relationality. 3.2 Theorising students’ learning outcomes on translanguaging and epistemological decentring

The power relations between different normative understandings of language practice and subjectivity were present in both Kramsch’ notion

Translanguaging, Epistemological Decentring and Power

31

of symbolic competence and Zarate’s concept of ‘pluricultural capital’, but in my fi rst study of the language profi les, I did not go into depth with this. I had learned that the sense of feeling tryg (Da. safe) while venturing outside of one’s ‘comfort zone’ was essential for the students (Bojsen, 2018). ‘Safe’ was the word chosen by students when asked what they enjoyed about the Language Profi le learning space and I mostly saw it as the result of our choice to avoid an error-correction focused didactic, and to teach students to take charge of their learning process. However, by bringing in the concept of decentring, I could see that safety appeared to be experienced and named also in those moments where students learnt to handle what I here choose to call a ‘linguacultural’ decentring. Such linguacultural decentring may or may not lead to an epistemological decentring for the individual student, depending on their point of departure. As such, I found Karen Risager’s defi nition of ‘linguaculture’ (Risager, 2006, 2020) useful to describe how the shift between Danish and French or German were tied into both individual, institutional and contextual common-sense practices and policies about which languages were mostly conceived as nationally bound and which were more in transnational flows. One can also say that I found linguacultural decentring to be an essential part of students’ acquired symbolic competence, that is closely connected to their plurilingual and pluricultural capital. Risager (2022) is aware of the creative element of language and of languaging (Jørgensen, 2008) that allow speakers to renew language practice when the context encourages them to do so. The social hierarchies between languages in a given time and space will have an impact on which new contributions will gain high status or not. In order to unpack this, I fi nd Bakhtin’s distinction between the centripetal and centrifugal function of discourse and language practice useful. Indeed, Bakhtin’s notion of what has been translated in English as ‘heteroglossia’ is congruent with Risager’s defi nition that a language can be separated from a given (national) culture, but that all languages always carry cultural dimensions (Risager, 2020). While genre, style, professions and disciplines can have centripetal impact on how language practices are orchestrated in writing or carried out orally, Bakhtin insists on the fact that both words and speakers come from a variety of social and cultural contexts and positions whose previous meaning productions will be carried into the next language practice, implicitly or explicitly. This diversity has a centrifugal impact on the language practice (Bakhtin, 1981). Bakhtin’s concepts can help us to identify the nexus between languaging, social practice and personal subjective response that may be in play when students experience that they are pushed either towards or away from a number of epistemological centres via different vectors such as institution policy, curricula and reading lists, common sense

32

Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research

understandings in society, etc. As such, I use Bakhtin’s concepts to identify power relation as tension between different centres and to establish how students may experience this as centrifugal or centripetal depending on their subject position as learners. As Bakhtin (1981) underlines, the centrifugal and centripetal pushes and pulls are at work simultaneously, but in different degrees and modalities. Finally, I have used Édouard Glissant’s theory of forced and free poetics (Glissant, 1976, 1981). Glissant was a Martinican poet, novelist, philosopher and activist, who served in UNESCO among other places. His thoughts on what he called ‘free poetics’ and ‘forced poetics’ (Glissant, 1976, 1981) have been informed by the Caribbean context and an educational system in French, which did not allow students to speak Creole, and that did not recognise Creole as a language (at most a ‘pidgin’) (Bojsen, 2014a, 2021; Glissant, 1981). Put very briefly, Glissant drew on folktales, historical and sociological analysis and on his study of how Creole and French were used by different social groups and registers to argue that for many people in Martinique, putting their lifeworld into language was a struggle. Speech acts in Creole would deploy detours, digressions and deviations. Historically, this was partly to avoid being understood, categorised and monitored by the epistemological and linguistic gaze of the slave owners. Glissant’s choice of saying ‘poetics’ rather than social discourse was, among other things, motivated by his theoretical, social and existential engagement. Poetry and art are the arenas where being and languaging can be thought and performed in new ways, yielding a space for innovation and resistance against remnants of the colonial categories. In Glissant’s experience, it was not possible to carve out such a space in formal educational structures (Glissant, 1976, 1981). The point is relevant for my analysis since parts of the curriculum and reading lists in the courses in Table 2.2 and all in Table 2.3 would describe this issue in a West African context (Niang, 2016). Glissant was inspired by the works of Deleuze and Guattari and I will also draw on these two philosophers when I talk about ‘minor’ languages or ‘minor’ linguacultures (Deleuze & Guattari, 1975). Drawing on their discussion of ‘littératures mineures’, my use of ‘minor’ in this chapter refers to a phenomenon that may not be ‘minor’ in number, nor in heuristic or moral value, but which is relegated to a position of no or very little importance, influence and consideration due to contextual circumstances. 4 Analysis

Recalling the research question of this study, how we as teachers and researchers may identify, describe and act on the power relations and pressures that have an impact on students’ learning about and possible practice of translanguaging and epistemological decentring, Section 3 has

Translanguaging, Epistemological Decentring and Power

33

already described my first steps into identifying and describing the power relations that may have an impact on students’ learning. In the analysis, laid out in this section, I fi rstly (Section 4.1) describe the actions and responses from me and my colleagues in terms of assigning readings that would allow students to have knowledge about and reflect on their educational context and positioning with a focus on monotranslanguaging and centring/decentring. Next, I focus on the essays and other data from Table 2.1, drawing on Risager, Bakhtin and Glissant to tease out knowledge about how students work with and respond to translanguaging and epistemological decentring. In Section 4.3 I focus on how students in other courses respond to and make use of the Language Profile students’ essays based on data from Table 2.2. In Section 4.4 I analyse exam papers that combine Language Profi le students’ essays and texts on West Africa (Table 2.3). The qualitative interviews are used to triangulate and develop points in those last two sections. 4.1 Translanguaging and decentring in the Language Profiles

As mentioned above, the Language Profiles at Roskilde University have worked with translanguaging in the dual sense described by Canagarajah, i.e. as theoretical positioning in relation to languages and as a practice. As a consequence of the latter, translanguaging has also been used to enable L2 learners to ensure flow in their speech. Recordings of student presentations documented how students, if allowed to speak freely and to use translanguaging at their own choice, would be able to activate their passive vocabulary in L2 within few minutes of speech (Bojsen, 2018). This result is not in itself decentring as speaking in L1 while learning L2 is part of the established didactic in foreign language education. However, acknowledging and using students’ plurilingual repertoire constituted a break with the norm and institutional policy of parallel monolingualism at RUC and in the Danish educational system (Fabricius et al., 2017; Holmen, 2014; Horst & Gitz-Johansen, 2010; see also Chapter 1 and Chapter 3 in this volume). Briefly summed up, this research demonstrates that only Danish and English are in fact legitimate languages in Higher Education in Denmark and that they are fi rmly relegated to separate spaces by authorities and institutions. Consequently, students who have language proficiencies in other languages most often try to hide this fact (Holmen, 2014). The public educational programmes preparing students for higher education programmes are characterised by school manuals and didactic tools and learning objectives that assume pupils to be a relative homogeneous linguacultural group, an assumption that has not been in accordance with the diversity experienced in the Danish classrooms since the 1980s and 1990s (Horst & Gitz-Johansen, 2010). In the Language Profile classes, a decentring effect began to take place as students and faculty worked in a multiplicity of L1s, thus decentring Danish

34

Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research

as the presumed L1 in the classroom. In addition, numerous L2s or L3s in the students’ repertoire added to the decentring as an ongoing process. Secondly, students were decentred from the monolingual or parallel monolingual paradigm of the official and normative educational practice. Rather than merely resisting these paradigms by showing alternative monolingual modalities of learning, the posture of the monolingual was challenged. In the introduction to the philosophy of the Language Profi les, students were reminded of how much English is present in Danish language practice, in higher education curricula and assigned readings, in media and political discourse without ever being identified as foreign whereas other languages are. In fact, the assumed monolingual Danish space is far from being monolingual. This is where we began to work into a proper epistemological decentring. Students were asked to identify and discuss in class the many ways in which plurilingualism was part of their daily lives via people they heard in the street, signs and posters, social media, accents, sociolects, etc. including the language of their Language Profi le. This meant that their perception of the foreign language they set out to investigate and improve in the Language Profi les was also decentred or poly-centred into many different varieties – but without glossing over the different social hierarchies and discursive openings or closures that would follow one variety or another. Another decentring endeavour was about opening up for the idea that reading and engaging in learning via a foreign language does not necessarily mean that you mainly or only use that learning to know something about national cultures that you or your educational institutions connect with that language. This point has certainly been counterintuitive to many students, mostly because of the idiosyncratic connections between nation and language in much foreign language education (Risager, 2018, 2021). I have many times faced surprised students when I encourage them to read about the US presidential elections or the Chinese position in South East Asia in the major French or German research and media in order to get a more diverse and thorough analysis than they get if they only read research from Danish or English language sources. Drawing on Bakhtin and Risager, I can describe this recurrent surprise, which I have detected for the past ten years, as the centripetal force of the nation as a category for understanding linguaculture. Despite all the empirical evidence of plurilingual practices within the nation space and transnational languaging flows that we all meet in our daily lives and that testify to the opposite. Students from Poland, Iceland or Romania may read about academic issues in their own languages, but I repeatedly hear that they never imagined that they could use readings in their first language in their academic work when studying in an English-language programme. The students who followed our advice discovered new ways of analysing and discussing world politics. There are many reasons why German

Translanguaging, Epistemological Decentring and Power

35

or French news outlets provide different information than Danish ones. They work on the basis of a different economy due to larger readership, which facilitates investigative journalism, and they also work in different linguaculture positions for both authors and the targeted readership in French or German. In the student essays in Chapter 10 in this volume, we have the example of students who discover that the Roma have a national song and flag by consulting research articles in French. Another group discover that Habermas’ concept of ‘System’, whose epistemological impact is discussed in relation to the German word ‘Lebenswelt’ (life world), is translated in a misleading way into Danish, i.e. as ‘Systemverden’ (system world). The mistake distorts the reception of Habermas because the Danish translation suggests that the two concepts refer to different parts of the same dimension. However, this would contradict Habermas’ argument (Bojsen, 2018). 4.2 Translanguaging and decentring: The importance of learners’ relation to the world

When going through the data in Table 2.1 on the Language Profi les (essays, surveys and transcriptions of recorded presentation and semester evaluation seminars), I marked passages where students were practising and/or mentioning translanguaging and decentring from what they perceived to be normative categories of knowledge description and production. The new set of concepts allowed me to see that students, when raising questions about their own subjectivity process, were engaging with the new language, linguaculture and the relation between language and nation (Risager, 2006, 2018, 2021) contextually. It was not only an individual personal process or an identity process. Words and gestures from people around them would often have direct influence on their approach to their learning process. The cultural and social diversities that they met via the Profi le language inside and outside of university also underlined that nationality was not the only qualifier. When nationality as a qualifier for a subject’s position, such as to be German or Danish, French or Canadian came up (as for instance in Eskil’s, Lena’s or Ulrik’s case in Chapter 10), it was to revise those categories, thus keeping them at arms-length, adding new nuances. Significantly, it was not a pondering about identity framed as an essentialist wondering about ‘who am I?’, even when Karen and Julie, Danish exchange students in French universities, observe that they began to behave differently socially either among peers or in class. Julie was less talkative in the fi rst months because it took more effort to talk; Karen became self-conscious as she was about the only student ever to answer or ask questions in class despite the fact that she was the only foreigner. Nevertheless, during their stay, they were able to carry out a deliberation on subjectivity as an ongoing process or ‘positioning’. In this

36

Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research

positioning, they realised the context had an impact on their languaging practice and that their language proficiency and performance had an impact on their relation with the context. They could see what was going on and made choices accordingly. Lena and Eskil both reflected thoroughly about their national identity categories. Lena had grown up in the Southern part of Denmark in the German minority community. She had already identified as both Danish and German and described how the Language Profi les provided the fi rst learning space in a Danish educational setting where she could draw openly on her plurilingual and pluricultural capital and on both linguacultures and use them in her academic work without being (too much) of an exception. Eskil resituated his understanding of Danish culture and ‘nationality’ in the halls of Sorbonne, when he heard how prominent French scholars were unable to pronounce key notions from the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard (1813–1855). He was able to connect parts of the philosopher’s works to his own childhood memories about specific physical localities and songs that are part of the Danish literary canon, written about these localities. Both Karen and Eskil experienced their subject position in relation to the learning experience of a ‘universally valid curriculum’ at a university in Paris as being different from that in Denmark. Karen writes: ‘It struck me that I was probably the only one who found it special to be taught in the heart of an old European great power and culture that had had a decisive influence on the content of the teaching and to which everything could be referred’ (p. 248, Chapter 10 in this volume). Eskil’s experience differed because the celebration of Kierkegaard provided him with a defi ning cultural and linguistic ‘moment’ where the power relation had shifted. Instead of him looking up words, lacking contextual knowledge, he could sit back, watch and hear the famous French philosophers skittering around like Bambi on ice in the Danish language when they attempt to pronounce the word ‘Øieblikket’ (Da. ‘moment’) in their discussion of the Danish existentialist philosopher Kierkegaard. Eskil notes that he gains new and deeper knowledge both about Kierkegaard and his own subject position as a Danish student of philosophy, precisely because he is now outside Denmark: As the Danish was put in a position that normally belongs to foreign cultures, for a moment, it also became a little ‘foreign’ to me. I was able to get acquainted with Jean-Luc Nancy’s alien, analytical glance at Kierkegaard and his Danish concepts. In fact, I was able to throw such glance at both Kierkegaard and those things in his mind-set that are linked to the Danish language and the Danish culture, all the implied layers of meaning in his language and his thinking. Such distant – and critical! – glance we do not usually throw at our own cultural background. For a moment, I found myself outside of my cultural

Translanguaging, Epistemological Decentring and Power

37

background, or between cultures, in a kind of ‘intercultural’ position. Everything about my own and others’ culture, which – by nature, as the backdrop for our lives – is usually self-evident and transparent, suddenly came into focus, in the same way as when one’s glasses are steamed up when entering a warm and crowded space directly from the cold winter night. (Eskil, p. 258, Chapter 10 in this volume).

Eskil’s experience can be perceived as García and Kleyn’s (2016) understanding of translanguaging as he develops his take on Danish and French in one coherent consciousness or conceptual repertoire despite the fact that the outside world seeks to place expressions and forms in various categories on the basis of language and nationality. However, we also clearly see how his thoughts are structured by the power relation between Danish and French, the student and faculty position, the position in the linguaculture as exogenous and/or endogenous. In these examples, the students are grappling with nation as a centripetal discursive entity that they are used to seeing and deploying for explaining linguaculture. However, by being decentred in different ways, they are able to reflect on the relation between nation, linguaculture and their own subjectivity process. For Julie and Karen, nationality is less dominant. The structuring centripetal element is rather the linguaculture of the institution and the ensuing expectations of how a student should behave on the one hand and, on the other, their own sense of self and expectations of themselves as students. The two centres of meaning clash and the students’ subjectivity and learning process can be seen as a movement between them in a maelstrom between centrifugal and -petal forces. As Bakhtin stated, the two are present simultaneously. They allow us to talk quite precisely about power relations between an individual and institutions, between individuals who draw on minor linguacultures in their language and learning repertoires in the face of major linguacultural context. Secondly, they allow us to identify students’ conceptual agency that emerges when translanguaging and decentring converge. Significantly, however, students rarely have the capacity to communicate their insight to people around them in the moment. Their symbolic competence in navigating between centripetal pressures from different centres is mostly a conversation they have with themselves or that may have come out in bits and pieces when discussing their experience with others after the events. Thirdly, they provide some interesting examples of how collective normativities of knowledge description and production have an impact on, but are still negotiated and modified in more or less subtle or silent ways by, the individual. So these different insights that students have about moving and acting across different linguacultures but cannot readily express in the situation, are they examples of what Glissant has called a forced poetics? Are Lena’s claim to be equally Danish and German, and Eskil’s position of feeling

38

Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research

national without being nationalistic and still insisting that the French language is part of his identity and subjectivity process such untenable positions that they may not even have an arena or register where they can appear? Despite the salient political pressure on discourses and individuals that deviate from major national categories and performances, I would say ‘no’ as both these narratives do speak into a longer genealogy of translation and trans-linguaculture thinking: Lena’s reference to Goethe in her introduction provides an example of this. Even Julie, who has insufficient language to explain her insights about doing group work when she and other students are asked to resolve a problem as a group, is not a proper proponent of a forced poetics because she does have the language and insight. This insight is just in Danish or English (and a little Spanish), which are not useful languages in this context. The question is interesting because it forces us to consider the difference between a temporary and voluntary decentring from the safe, comfortable and well-known centre, a situation you can opt out of if you wish, and a situation that is permanent. Bi-nationals and plurilingual subjects are inextricably tied into two or more linguacultures and will experience different variations of the pressure to identify and perform as either one or the other, depending on where they are situated. However, Glissant’s notion of ‘forced poetics’ refers to languaging and signifying practices that are not scaffolded by ostensibly strong and ‘official’ social institutions. It refers to languaging practices that emerge out of a social, both collective and individual, struggle of and for being, that may not even be clear to the concerned speakers because they are not in a position to defi ne and defend their languaging practice. 4.3 Students in the programme Cultural Encounters responding to Language Profile student essays

In this section, I will focus on my analysis of the exam papers that dealt with the Language Profi le student essays (Table 2.3). It should be noted that even if the students had been briefly introduced to the notions of decentring and translanguaging, no students used the terms explicitly. With regards to students who discussed the West African context, two predominant focal points emerged that I will lay out below. Firstly, drawing on Hampâté Bâ’s (2000) narrative about the rise and fall of an influential interpreter in colonial West Africa (currently Mali and Burkina Faso and based on a true story), they discussed how French colonial rule in its administrative practice would use French. This entailed forcing French upon the African population in education and administrative business while not valuing knowledge and language practices in African languages other than as exotic objects of study. In this context, the students were naturally interested in the figure of the interpreter

Translanguaging, Epistemological Decentring and Power

39

Wangrin, as he became the right hand of French colonial administrators while covertly working against them. Several took notice of how Wangrin would navigate between the languages French and Bambara and how he was able to carry himself along the codes of both colonial and native body language when interacting with people according to which semiotic register that would suit him best. The second focal point, drawn from texts by Alcinda Honwana (2013) and Amy Niang (2016), concerned social conditions of youth in relation to education and jobs and how youth respond to a neo-colonial education structure that is set in the colonial languages and is often far away from the realities and needs of the available job market. Students would notice the issue of language hierarchies and how certain languages provide access to certain kinds of knowledge while occluding others. They would also point out Niang’s focus on how the use of language in activist songs against the regime in Senegal would produce a horizontal sense of community, comparable with Anderson’s emphasis on the signification of national languages during the emergence of European nation-states as ‘imagined communities’ (1983). Indeed, several were able to identify how elements in the West African state regime worked in rationalities and languages inaccessible to the majority of the populations. They argued that this would be structurally comparable to the vertical power structure of the sovereign, God, Church/King/Emperor, aristocracy, before the emergence of national language and print-capitalism that would scaffold the emergence of the national community as a horizontal space, as Anderson famously argued. Perhaps a primary reason why students did not use the notion of translanguaging was because they were unable to see that this was actually what was going on when the interpreter Wangrin in Hampâté Bâ’s text would adeptly change between French and Bambara (and other languages which he of course would learn dependent on where he was traveling). Likewise, no one mentioned the translanguaging practice of the narrative that students read in its English translation from French, and that had kept Hampâté Bâ’s dissemination of concepts in Bambara and Fulfulde. But a few did note that the interpreter had extra knowledge and skill due to his extensive knowledge and competences in several languages and cultures. With regards to the translanguaging practice of activist lyrics, students only commented on their use of language as a tool of power and resistance against oppression. Only one student went into a more detailed analysis of the Malian rapper Inna Modja’s use of English and Bambara, but very little French, in her song. A secondary reason for students not deploying the concept and term translanguaging was suggested during the ensuing interviews. The students reflected that for them and other young people in higher education, the natural shift and blending of languaging is something that will take place outside of formal learning and educational settings.

40

Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research

Several of the students with migrant family backgrounds (data from interviews and informal conversations with students in other classes, documented with their consent, N = 8) related that they had been forbidden to talk and learn in their fi rst language in Danish primary and secondary schools that had a Danish-only policy. One student (interview) recognised that her spontaneous emotional response when overhearing another student talking with her parents in her first language, an East European language, in the midst of a group work at the Roskilde University Library, was that of the internalised institutional condemnation that one must not speak that language in an educational context. Others explained that their fi rst language is mostly only spoken at home, often blended with Danish endings or words so that it becomes a family language rather than a national or regional standardised language. Some would like to study their fi rst language in more detail, but fi nd it difficult to fi nd educational opportunities to do so. They were also discouraged by the experience that linguistic and cultural deviations from the perceived Danish norms are considered with suspicion, a resistance to ‘integration’, especially if your language is related to what people consider Muslim language areas. As for students who did not have minor languages as part of the social life and family background, they would often state that they only ever heard and used Danish and English in their education and social life. Yet, when talking more in detail with them, I often learnt that they had used other languages such as Greenlandic, Turkish, Swahili in relation to their project group work – that is done every semester at Roskilde University – as preparation for field work, working with interpreters or interviewing in an intermediate language. One student also noted that other languages were implicitly present via the variety of accents and ways of using English on campus. It is understandable that these different forms of shifting between languages were never related to the notion of translanguaging since the students are not language students and the notion was only briefly introduced. However, it is remarkable that students appeared to be unable to remember and place their own use of these other languages as part of their learning processes and languaging repertoires. As part of my inclusive interview methodology in which I always try to include the interlocutors as partners and co-producers of knowledge (Bojsen, 2014b), I confronted the students concerned with this at the end of the interviews, asking them what they thought might be at stake. Interestingly, they could not provide any other explanation than when they were asked about language deployed in learning in higher education, they immediately thought about languages officially imposed in curricula and reading lists, in institution and classroom language policies and not about their own practice and learning work in relation to the texts and informal discussion in or outside of the classroom. The setting aside of minor languages in their crucial project work is a particularly striking example of the power of institutional framing of languaging. One student

Translanguaging, Epistemological Decentring and Power

41

even forgot to mention and acknowledge that they had followed courses in Swahili and been able to use the language when doing fieldwork in East Africa. A general takeaway from these observations for me as a teacher and researcher is that the students, when studying others, were generally able to identify the discursive, sociopolitical, educational and existential power of a language that can instil legitimacy and meaning among its speakers. When considering their own situation, it was only students with a minority language and minor linguaculture background, who were able to do the same. Coincidence or not, this suggests a dynamic that may be worth exploring in future research: that students who are socially positioned in a more comfortable or privileged majority position may have a more limited set of perspectives (and consequently poorer analytical repertoires?), because they have not been exposed to certain dynamics as social beings and as learners. I concluded that if cultural and linguistic majority students could use the Language Profi le essays and their mixed experiences from their foreign language classes in high school to understand some parts, it did not bring them all the way. I also learnt that the institutions that sustain certain languages at the expense of others are decisive agents in this process. Students could identify how certain language practices and arenas perform resistance against social hegemonies in which different institutions take part. In the exam papers students were able to point at the struggles of language encounters, at centrifugal and centripetal dynamics and the symbolic competence exerted by some West African agents in their manoeuvring around and against oppressive linguaculture normativities and demands. However, I also learnt that it remained hard for them to go into a particular translanguaging instance and dissect what was going on in the utterance of a protagonist, a song’s lyric or different texts that may be practicing translanguaging. So why is this decentring beyond the Eurocentric canon of curricular and translanguaging contexts that we usually present to our students relevant and interesting one may ask? Firstly, colonial and post-colonial translanguaging practices and language encounters are not without significance, but are in fact situated at the centre of European economic, political and academic history and contemporary practices. Disciplines of anthropology, archaeology, biology, geography, medicine, and many others have been studying various peoples, objects, developed mapping and technologies, often in close fi nancial, logistical and ideological cooperation with the colonial regimes. This has historically meant working with interpreters, drawing on local languages and epistemologies. Anker (2001) and Grove (1995) provide some rigorous and well-documented accounts of this with regards to biology and geography.

42

Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research

Secondly, our student body is diverse and so is the world they live in outside of university as is the job market where they will unfold their competences. Knowingly or not, students in European universities are interacting with former colonies in many ways via the different products they consume. Indeed, several students would write or see me after class, thanking me explicitly for including texts that would introduce them to both contemporary and historical knowledge and theory from West Africa. Their appreciation had different reasons: they had family or friends from the region, they had travelled there, they were of migrant background and just appreciated the break with US/UK/Europe examples only or they were simply aware of the intellectual insularity that one may be trapped into as a European and/or city-dweller. My point with these two remarks is to suggest that for quite a number of students, the choice to include West African thinkers and cases was not an epistemological decentring from their lifeworlds, linguistic or cultural repertoires or desired learning space. It was, however, an epistemological decentring from their lifeworld as learners in an institutional context. For these students, this body of texts (and music videos) was – for very different reasons – rather acknowledging an existing part of their intellectual concerns, concerns that were often not stimulated or addressed by educational institutions in a nuanced way in Europe, unless presented as examples of ‘otherness’ and ‘the field’. So what is decentred here? Is it my practice and norms as a teacher? Given the fact that my research areas are West African and Caribbean theory and sociocultural practices, it is not a new decentring issue since teaching in Danish higher education is supposed to be research based. This leads me to consider that epistemological centring and decentring is less about presence or absence than about visibility and actual inclusion of a multiplicity of positions and perspectives in the analytical and theoretical work we do. 4.4 Relating privileged foreign language learning to linguacultural struggles in West Africa

The drive to move beyond one’s comfort zone in the quest for learning became a leit-motif in the writing of the essays authored by the Language Profile students from Roskilde University (Bojsen, 2018). Both readings of the exam papers and the interviews with students who studied the Language Profi le essays reveal a certain awe for this endeavour. Many could identify with the difficulties of navigating in the linguaculture of the university during the fi rst and second year in university in particular, but also when just taking a new course. Table 2.3 indicates that close to 16% of the exam papers that referred to the Language Profile essays made combinations in the analysis between the West African context and the

Translanguaging, Epistemological Decentring and Power

43

Language profi le students. Some because they had some knowledge of the region already, a few because they dared leave their comfort zone. They most often focused on examples of language barriers that would be reinforced by certain behaviour of the language majority. Several of these students pointed out how the Danish student Karen, who went to study in France, could bond with Canadian exchange students from the French-speaking part of Canada and whose fi rst language was French. Despite their fluency and perfect grammar, the Canadian students encountered disdaining remarks on their language from their French peers, as do migrants in the Danish educational system (Holmen, 2014). Many others were touched by Anna’s efforts to follow classes in French in that same part of Canada, where all teachers but one refused to give her and other students access to a dictionary during the exam. However, none of the students appeared to notice the language biography of that one teacher. Significantly, his fi rst language was German, coming from the Germanspeaking part of a plurilingual context, namely Switzerland. As they compared the structure and dynamics with the West African context, students noticed that language proficiency was a pathway or barrier for knowledge. They identified this to be true for the interpreter Wangrin in Hampâté Bâ’s text, for contemporary young people in West Africa and for the Danish students struggling with French in France and Québec. A handful of students used this line of thought to discuss the subject position of refugees in Denmark whose acceptance into Danish society largely depends on their access to the Danish language. In all cases, the acquisition of the language of power is made difficult by different structural and relational parameters. The inclusion of Benedict Anderson’s discussion of language showed that students were attentive to and trying to operationalise the notion of ‘imagined community’ in discussing the different struggles and language encounters. The students identified a nexus between the imagined national Danish and French language communities that could have a negative impact on the learning process of students who deviated from the perceived norm inside and outside of the formal learning space. In Canada, the language community of the French-speaking region is in a minority and minor position, and students acknowledged Anna’s reflection that the hostility to English may come from the French speakers’ struggle as a linguistic minority group against an English-speaking majority. The readings of the West African context identified the impact of an imagined French community as superior during colonial times. With regards to contemporary language and activist struggles, students found the state administrations and educational systems in West Africa neglected students’ first languages. They identified this as oppressive structures that were encountered by an alternative imagined community by activists and artists. In these imagined communities, languages were mixed and at times French was totally absent. The economic and

44

Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research

social success of the musicians in their effort to hold politicians accountable meant that students saw the West African context as an example of how creative and innovative language practice can have an emancipating effect. Yet, this idea was not followed through in the student papers with regards to how such or similar language practices could eventually be deployed in a Danish or French context. Notably, a student also observed that the Language Profi le students have made a voluntary choice to work in a language that they have not (yet) mastered during the classes. The exchange period was relatively short. However, for the West African students and for the migrants and refugees in Denmark, there is no real choice. Such an observation is a good example of how students’ work with the power relation dynamics helps them to identify central conditions and parameters that may influence the relation between translanguaging practices and decentring. If we consider the notions of forced and free poetics, we may propose a structural analysis that can help us explain and nuance these observations. For one, let us remember that neither forced nor free poetics are static entities. It may be more productive to describe them as positions on a continuum. If we do this, we can see that the Language Profile students, whether they are in Denmark or abroad, appear to have a particular relation to the foreign language that they wish to learn, as has been laid out by Kramsch (2009). We can see that they demonstrate desires to investigate translanguaging as a learning strategy. Yet, the educational systems, in Denmark or abroad, mostly support learning one or the other language and linguacultures, and not the relation to the language, not the strategy of translanguaging. With regards to non-Language Profi le students, one could perhaps argue that the quest to learn via translanguaging in other subjects than foreign language courses is relegated to a space of forced poetic. The desire is there and it is actually happening, but there is no proper conceptualising or fulfilment of it. Students either forget that they are in fact carrying out translanguaging or they engage in learning with translanguaging in other arenas of informal learning, outside of higher education. With regards to migrants and refugees in Denmark, their position is probably the closest to living a relation of forced poetics that students meet in the courses. Indeed, the languages of their parents, which are in most cases their first or one of several first languages, are often considered with suspicion or at best, ignored, by pedagogical and educational professionals, didactics and educational programmes. This is despite the documented fact that it would enhance their learning outcome in Danish to receive some sort of support in developing skills in their first language (Tegunimataka, 2021). As suggested by the interviews, the relation that migrant students entertain with the first language is ambivalent: at home, it is the language of the family, perhaps other families with similar linguaculture positions. Outside of the home, it is censored, barred and must be made as invisible as possible.

Translanguaging, Epistemological Decentring and Power

45

Indeed, for many learners with migrant background anything they do or say will be received, fi ltered and evaluated not as that of a neutral student, but as that of a ‘migrant student’. As an example, one of the interviewed students who has continuously been among the top students in her class throughout her trajectory in the Danish education system said that she was used to being categorised fi rstly as a Muslim student of colour, not fi rstly as ‘the smart one’. When she went into a new school, she impressed her teachers with her language and academic skills, and a teacher spontaneously exclaimed that she was not at all like other migrant students and had she talked with student X who was also from that country? As she identifies as Danish before other national and ethnic qualifiers, the remark was disheartening. Her testimony and several others that I have talked to in the three-year-period of this data collection (Table 2.2) indicate that students with migrant background may assimilate to Danish linguaculture all they want, but they will still be singled out as other kinds of learners. Especially, the categories of ethnicity, race and religion appear to have such dominance that migrant students’ excellence in Danish and academic languaging are seen as exceptions. In addition, their fi rst language must be hidden away in the educational contexts. 5 Conclusion: Power Relation and Privilege in Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring

I set out to investigate how translanguaging is connected with epistemological decentring in higher education, focusing on what I as a teacher can learn from students’ perspectives as they appear in different sets of data from different types of courses. Additionally, I wanted to assess whether the notions of linguaculture, centripetal and centrifugal discourses, and forced and free poetics would be analytically relevant for my analysis. I did fi nd these notions useful, especially if I looked at the last four as positions in two sorts of continuum (centripetal – centrifugal; forced and free poetics). My summary of fi ndings and learning points as a teacher and researcher below should unpack this. The coding of the data forced me to take two dimensions into account that I had initially wanted to avoid in order to make a more focused analysis. However, I realised that ignoring these dimensions would produce a distorted presentation of the data. One dimension is the importance of the silent languages and linguacultures, that appear to be silent in the university context but that are part of students’ repertoires in different ways, deployed mainly outside of the formal spaces of higher education. The other is the striking impact of how students’ personal and societal surroundings perform and understand translanguaging and epistemological decentring or not. More specifically, I have learnt that the students’ learning process was marked by the perception of the languages in their repertoire, held not

46

Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research

only by the students themselves, but also by their families, their teachers, the institution, by policymakers, media and students’ social contacts. These perceptions – and language practices – were in fact powerful ‘centres’, some of which would speak directly into the epistemological tradition of the educational context. It was striking, but perhaps not surprising, that these perceptions would often draw on the national as a decisive category. The social status of L2 was implicitly or explicitly compared to L1, which was always assumed to be Danish except for the courses taught in English, where all other languages than English were forbidden in order to keep the Danish dominance at bay (Fabricius et al., 2017). As such, the social, cultural and political dynamics of Danish national space worked implicitly and explicitly as a norm or a neutral point of departure depending on the learning context, but in all cases as an epistemological centre that was at work but without admitting so. A third important finding was initiated by my analysis of the Language Profi le essays where I realised that the occurrences of translanguaging practice or reflection would be very much connected with their relation with the languages of their repertoire and with the centres that would have an impact on this relation and consequently on their learning. This finding is perhaps naturally derived from the previous fi nding. I found that students’ practice and understanding of translanguaging and decentring learning were influenced, less by which of the available categories they might subscribe to or be ascribed to by their surroundings, but more by the relation they were able to develop with the categories and the diversity of academic concepts and categories across languages. Even if I had started out by coding the material based on concepts describing students’ performances and knowledge skills, it became clear that the analysis should rather focus on students’ relation with these concepts. The notion of ‘forced poetics’ helped me identify perspective as a crucial parameter in identifying epistemological centring and decentring. To carry out minor language practices in a forced poetic in the face of a dominant (major) language norm may not be decentring. It may just reconfi rm the existing hierarchy. To those who speak the established major language, certainly speaking in a minor language and adapting to its linguaculture could have a personal decentring effect. Yet, for those who mostly express themselves in that minor languaging, it is not decentring; it is everyday life and struggle, their centre. It is a languaging position in which speakers of the minor position are heavily marked by centripetal and centrifugal pressures from different discursive normativities from both major and minor linguacultures. This also meant that the students’ ability to understand and connect the translanguaging strategies and to grasp the issue of epistemological decentring in the Language Profi le essays with examples from outside of

Translanguaging, Epistemological Decentring and Power

47

the Danish context was limited and very much dependent on their biographic and perspectival position. References Anderson, B. (1983) Imagined Communities. Refl ections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Anker, P. (2001) Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895– 1945. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bakhtin, M.M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination. (Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist). Austin: Texas University Press. Bojsen, H. (2014a) Creole practices as prescriptive guidelines for language didactics? A selective overview of Glissant’s thoughts on language and social identity. Karib – Nordic Journal for Caribbean Studies 1 (1), 79–105. Bojsen, H. (2014b) Who decides what to develop and how? Methodological reflections on postcolonial contributions to analysis of development fieldwork. In F. Dervin and K. Risager (eds) Researching Identity and Interculturality (pp. 175–196). New York: Routledge. Bojsen, H. (2021) Édouard Glissant and the geography of Relation. Karib – Nordic Journal for Caribbean Studies, 6 (1), 1–8. http://doi.org/10.16993/karib.83 Bojsen, H. (ed.) (2018) Hvis du ikke kan sproget … Om fl ersprogethed og læring på RUC’s Sprogprofiler. Frederiksberg: Samfundslitteratur. Canagarajah, S. (2013) Introduction. In S. Canagarajah (ed.) Literacy As Translingual Practice: Between Communities and Classrooms (pp. 1–10). New York: Routledge. Daryai-Hansen, P., Barfod, S. and Schwarz, L. (2017) A call for (trans)languaging: The Language Profiles at Roskilde University. In C.M. Mazak and K.S. Carroll (eds) Translanguaging in Higher Education: Beyond Monolingual Ideologies (pp. 29–49). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1975) Kafka. Pour une littérature mineure. Paris: Minuit. Fabricius, A., Mortensen, J. and Haberland, H. (2017) The lure of internationalization: Paradoxical discourses of transnational student mobility, linguistic diversity and cross-cultural exchange. Higher Education 73 (4), 577–595. Ferguson, G. (2003) Classroom code-switching in post-colonial contexts. Functions, attitudes and policies. AILA Review, Africa and Applied Linguistics 14, 38–51. Foucault, M. (1969) L’archéologie du savoir. Paris: Éditions de Gallimard. García, O. and Kleyn, T. (2016) Translanguaging with Multilingual Students: Learning from Class Room Moments. New York: Routledge. García, O. and Otheguy, R. (2019) Plurilingualism and translanguaging: Commonalities and divergences. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 23 (1), 17–35. Glissant, E. (1976) Free and forced poetics. Alcheringa 2 (2), 95–101. Glissant, E. (1981) Le discours antillais. Paris: Éditions Gallimard. Grove, R.H. (1995) Green Imperialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hampâté Bâ, A. (2000 [1978]) The Fortunes of Wangrin. (Translated from French into English by Aina Pavolini Taylor). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Holmen, A. (2014) ‘Being bilingual means being a foreigner’. Categorizing linguistic diversity among students in Danish Higher Education. Hermes – Journal of Language and Communication in Business 53, 11–24. Honwana, A. (2013) Youth, Waithood, and Protest Movements in Africa. Lugard Lecture, International African Institute, https://www.internationalafricaninstitute.org/downloads/lugard/Lugard%20Lecture%20%202013.pdf hooks, b. (2012) Writing Beyond Race: Living Theory and Practice. New York: Routledge.

48

Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research

Horst, C. and Gitz-Johansen, T. (2010) Education of ethnic minority children in Denmark: Monocultural hegemony and counter positions. Intercultural Education 21 (2), 137–151. Jørgensen, J.N. (2008) Languaging. Nine Years of Poly-Lingual Development of Young Turkish-Danish Grade School Students. Copenhagen Studies in Bilingualism, Vol I + II. Copenhagen: Det Humanistiske Fakultet, Københavns Universitet. Kramsch, C. (2019) Between globalization and decolonization. Foreign languages in the cross-fi re. In D. Macedo (ed.) Decolonizing Foreign Language Education: The Misteaching of English and Other Colonial Languages (pp. 50–72). New York: Routledge. Kramsch, C. (2006) From communicative competence to symbolic competence. The Modern Language Journal 90 (2), 249–252. Kramsch, C. (2009) The Multilingual Subject. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Macedo, D. (ed.) (2019) Decolonizing Foreign Language Education. The Misteaching of English and Other Colonial Languages. New York: Routledge. Marshall, S. and Moore, D. (2018) Plurilingualism amid the panoply of lingualisms: Addressing critiques and misconceptions in education. International Journal of Multilingualism 15 (1), 19–34. Niang, A. (2016) Dialectics of subversion: Protest art and political dissidence in West Africa. In P. Ugor and Lord Mawuko-Yevugah (eds) African Youth Cultures in a Globalized World: Challenges, Agency and Resistance (Chap 9, 15 p.) New York: Routledge. Ebook. Risager, K. (2022) Culture and materials development. In J.E. Norton and H. Buchanan (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Materials Development for Language Teaching (pp. 109–122). New York: Routledge. Risager, K. (2006) Language and Culture: Global Flows and Local Complexity. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Risager, K. (2018) Representations of the World in Language Textbooks. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Risager, K. (2020) Linguaculture and transnationality. The cultural dimensions of language. In J. Jackson (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Language and Intercultural Communication (2nd edn, pp. 101–116). New York: Routledge. Risager, K. (2021) Language textbooks: Windows to the world, Language, Culture and Curriculum 34 (2), 119–132. https://doi.org/10.1080/07908318.2020.1797767 Tegunimataka, A. (2021) Does fi rst-language training matter for immigrant children’s school achievements? Evidence from a Danish school reform. Nordic Journal of Migration Research 11 (3), 316–340. Zarate, G. (1998) D’une culture à d’autres: Critères pour évaluer la structure d’un capital pluriculturel. LIDIL – Alternance des langues: Enjeux socio-culturels et identitaires 18, 141–151.

3 More Languages for More Students: Practice, Ideology and Management Marta Kirilova, Anne Holmen and Sanne Larsen

1 Introduction

Many universities in non-Anglophone contexts struggle with the consequences of internationalization of academia for their language policies. Research, teaching and administration are all influenced by changes in university demography and curriculum. These changes also affect language use. Today, English is often taken for granted as the language of research communication. Countries in Northern Europe have been fast in introducing English as a medium of instruction not only for international students, but also for many domestic students. At the same time, these countries, which often have publicly fi nanced universities with local societal obligations, emphasize the need to maintain and further develop the local language(s) for academic purposes. To address the simultaneous need for English and Danish, the University of Copenhagen (UCPH) decided in 2008 to refer to the Nordic principle of parallel language use as the guiding principle in matters of language policy (see defi nition below). However, UCPH has a long tradition for drawing on other languages than English and Danish when relevant in research and teaching. Although the interest in continental European as well as non-European languages has been reduced with the spread of English, there are both traditional and innovative reasons to support the use of other languages at UCPH. When UCPH launched a new multilingual strategy in 2013, it happened as a rare mixture of a top-down initiative and a diversity of locally formulated interests in promoting students’ competences in specific languages. The launch of the strategy was simultaneous with the onset of the University’s first language policy as an organization characterized by the principle of parallel language use and thus with a main focus on the balance between Danish and English, but with a subsection on other languages. In this chapter, we focus on the multilingual strategy called More Languages for More Students and track its development through its five

49

50

Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research

active years (2013–2018). One aim of this chapter is to describe the strategy as an example of language policy work at a fairly traditional university with a hyper-complex organizational structure. Here we focus on the process of rolling out the strategy at different levels of the organization (macro, meso and micro) and the identification of advocates as well as gatekeepers at/across these levels. Another aim is to discuss the extent to which the role of other languages may be characterized as one of decentring since English is often viewed as a default language in academic communication. After setting up our theoretical framework and providing an overview of the kinds of data we have access to, we present different kinds of analyses to describe and discuss the strategy. We fi rst set the context by examining the main documents behind the strategy. We then track the phases involved in rolling out the strategy, paying attention to the different agents involved and their roles, before turning to our core data. These include surveys, minutes from dialogue meetings at different organizational levels, and evaluation reports assessing the outcomes of pilot projects – data that were collected to identify language needs among students and develop instructional models for addressing these. We end by presenting the policy recommendations that the strategy reported back to UCPH management. 2 Theoretical Framework

In this section, we outline two theoretical notions central to our analyses. First, we defi ne decentring as a linguistic practice through the combined perspective of translingual practices (Canagarajah, 2018) and disciplinary literacies (Airey, 2011). Second, we go through different definitions and components of language policy, which we use to outline and discuss the different levels of management (macro, meso, micro), agency and participation in More Languages for More Students. 2.1 Decentring as a linguistic practice

The notion of decentring, known from psychology (Piaget, 1962), (post)colonial scholarship (Said, 1993) and more recent identity studies (Romero, 2017) broadly denotes the process of shifting from an already established center or a dominant ideology, theory or practice in order to apply multiple perspectives to the study of this particular ideology/theory/ practice. Decentring relates to the awareness of existing different epistemological perspectives (e.g. cultural, social, national, global) that could be situated in a given socioconceptual hierarchy (Canagarajah, 2013, 2018; Marshall & Moore, 2018; Romero, 2017). One example of decentring is the emerging needs of staff and students for teaching and learning skills in languages other than English (e.g. Daryai-Hansen & Kirilova, 2019; Daryai-Hansen et al., 2017). However,

More Languages for More Students: Practice, Ideology and Management

51

alongside everyday multilingual needs and practices, we encounter a pervasive global ideology, centered around English as the only communicative solution at non-Anglophone European universities (Marshall & Moore, 2018) and the default medium of instruction at many universities around the world (Canagarajah, 2013; Fabricius et  al., 2017; Henriksen et  al., 2019; Holmen, 2016; Makoni & Pennycook, 2007). Thus, the notion of decentring is one way of describing the strains between the daily multilingual practices, and the dominance of English as a lingua franca. So far, studies have addressed decentring as an abstract concept. We fi nd it nonetheless useful to unpack decentring as a linguistic practice that takes notice of mobility, linguistic hybridity and strategic multilingual competence (Blommaert, 2010; Blommaert & Backus, 2013). For this purpose, we draw on Canagarajah’s (2013) translingual practice and Airey’s (2011) notion of disciplinary literacies. We tap into translingual practice (and not other popular concepts such as translanguaging) for several reasons. Firstly, we believe that translingual practice addresses more precisely language use as a social practice, and secondly – since Canagarajah’s studies draw on university contexts – it resonates better with our participants’ needs for enhancing learning through multilingual competences. While translanguaging seems to focus on bilingual pedagogies (Creese & Blackledge, 2015; García & Li Wei, 2014), and poly- and metrolingualism concerns transcending linguistic norms and negotiating cultural identities (Jørgensen et  al., 2015; Pennycook & Otsuji, 2019), translingual practices and translingual needs (which is our term for the needs articulated by our participants) point to the wide palette of linguistic resources that students and lecturers orient to in relation to study programs. The notion of disciplinary literacies, defined as ‘the ability to appropriately participate in the communicative practices of a discipline’ (Airey, 2011: 3), likewise underpins the linguistic practice of decentring as it breaks with the idea that literacy is one single knowledge/ability in one single communicative practice. Airey argues that disciplinary literacies concern three interrelated but separate areas: academic, societal and work-related. This implies that the use of particular language skills (reading, writing) or language codes (Danish, English, French, German, Swedish) take on different meanings for students as they appropriate them for specific learning purposes in specific contexts – inside and outside the university. Some students may possess (or need to possess) only oral competences in several ‘languages’ but no writing skills, just as other students will be able to read different linguistic codes but need no skills for interacting in these particular linguistic codes. Thus, disciplinary literacy opens up for a more nuanced and context-based approach to literacy as belonging to different areas. As we shall demonstrate in the analysis, the various agents in More Languages for More Students are aware of the differences in the disciplinary literacies and attribute different translingual needs to them.

52

Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research

To sum up, we conceptualize the university as a global site in which multiple languages, multiple language skills and multiple disciplinary literacies come into contact through the mobile resources of lecturers and students. The notion of decentring as a linguistic practice usefully captures the tensions between ideology, policy and practice, addressing the emerging shifts from monolingual teaching and learning to a more integrated approach of teaching and acquiring strategic multilingual repertories and multilingual disciplinary skills. 2.2 Language policy

In an early defi nition of language policy, Kaplan and Baldauf (1997: xi) suggest that ‘a language policy is a body of ideas, laws, regulations, rules and practices intended to achieve the planned language change in the societies, group or system’. To Schiff man (1996), language policies are social constructs that rest on ‘values, beliefs, attitudes, prejudices, religious structures, and all the other cultural “baggage” that speakers bring to their dealings with language from their background’ (Schiffman, 1996: 276). This cultural baggage or ‘linguistic culture’ is not an outcome of language policy but an underlying element that could have arisen independently of it. Thus, although implicitly, Schiffman seems to point to different processes and different components of language policy, which Spolsky later interrelates and conceptualizes further. For example, Spolsky (2004) sees language policy as functioning both ‘from below’ and ‘from above’ and as comprising three mutually interconnected elements. (1) Language practices – ‘the habitual pattern of selecting among the varieties that make up its linguistic repertoire’ (Spolsky, 2004: 5), i.e. the linguistic behaviors and choices of people. (2) Language beliefs or ideology – i.e. values and beliefs about languages and their mutual status/hierarchies (see also Risager, 2012). (3) Language management (see also Spolsky, 2019) – the observable and often explicit effort by a dominant managing body to modify people’s practices and beliefs, existing at many different levels (e.g. Ministry, Rectorate, Faculty, Department). In Spolsky’s view, practices and beliefs are most often unintentional and unplanned, while language management may be planned and governed by rules and procedures that sometimes have a direct impact on the practice (and the ideology). The different types and functions of language policies are often presented as dichotomies – e.g. overt/covert, explicit/ implicit, top-down/bottom-up. Johnson (2013: 10) provides a useful overview of the different language policy types represented in Table 3.1. He argues that the dichotomies are certainly negotiable; they can be created, interpreted and appropriated across multiple levels or layers. For example, a bottom-up policy developed in the university and for the university can

More Languages for More Students: Practice, Ideology and Management

53

Table 3.1 Language policy types (from Johnson, 2013: 10) Genesis

Top-down Macro-level policy developed by some governing or authoritative body or person

Bottom-up Micro-level or grassroots generated policy for and by the community that it impacts

Means and goals

Overt Overtly expressed in written or spoken policy texts

Covert Intentionally concealed at the macrolevel (collusive) or at the micro-level (subversive)

Documentation

Explicit Officially documented in written or spoken policy texts

Implicit Occurring without or in spite of official policy texts

In law and in practice

De jure Policy “in law”; officially documented in writing

De facto Policy “in practice”; refers to both locally produced policies that arise without or in spite of de jure policies and local language practices that differ from de jure policies; de facto practices can reflect (or not) de facto policies

be experienced as a top-down policy for students, lecturers and administration. Johnson’s dichotomies are in fact relative, depending on which groups or individual agents create and appropriate the policy. Policies can be more or less powerful and with more or less hidden agendas, covertly embedded in official (de jure) policies (e.g. Shohamy, 2006). Agency and power therefore play a central role. McCarty (2011: 8) has argued that language polices are multilayered and reside on ‘human interaction, negotiation, and production mediated by relations of power’. Thus, she constructs language policies as mechanisms that produce power asymmetries and regulate language use, rather than simple ‘top-down’ or ‘bottom-up’ processes (see also McCarty et al., 2011). With More Languages for More Students as a case, we aim at showing what happens when language policy ‘from above’ (i.e. policy promoted by the dominant institutional level) meets the identification of language needs ‘from below’ (i.e. needs and practices borne through particular groups of students and lecturers). In essence, we are interested in both describing what goes on language-wise in internationalized universities and in identifying and discussing the power relations that occur in the tension field between different levels. In our data, the power dimension is particularly visible at the local management (meso) level. All policy members can act as policy agents, and managers take on different roles, e.g. gatekeepers, advocates or neutral representatives (see Grin, 2012; Holmen, 2018; Hult & Källkvist, 2016), which further complicates both practices and decision-making processes. Most notable is the spread of English as a lingua franca officially managed as the default language of the university (Mortensen & Haberland, 2012). Since the 1990s, Danish universities have become gradually more and more dominated by

54

Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research

English despite being (in principle) still Danish-medium institutions (Mortensen & Haberland, 2012). English was first used for research publications and networking outside Denmark, but with the gradual increase of internationally recruited members of staff as well as more international students, English started being used to a wider extent for teaching and internal communication. As a consequence – and because the general level of English is considered relatively high in Denmark (compared to e.g. Central and Eastern European countries) – English as a lingua franca is not only managed as the default language of the university but also naturally practiced among students, lecturers and administration (Kling, 2013; Larsen, 2013). However, as we shall demonstrate in the analytical sections, many students as well as members of staff have experienced that their English competences are inadequate in specific situations, and languages other than English (although often denied by the management) are both used and needed by the students and lecturers at the micro-level (Daryai-Hansen & Kirilova, 2019; Holmen, 2018, 2020; Nissen, 2018). A similar pattern is reported by the students in Darling and Dervin’s study (this volume). Before turning to the analysis of More Languages for More Students, we shall give a short introduction to UCPH, its mandate and educational profi le, as this seems to have played an important role for the genesis of the strategy in 2008. 3 UCPH 2008: Parallel Language Use Introduced

According to recent comparative studies (Dafouz & Smit, 2016; Gregersen, 2014; Hultgren et al., 2014), European universities are increasingly engaged in language issues related to internationalization. This applies to Anglophone as well as non-Anglophone contexts, and UCPH is no exception. Like many other Nordic universities, UCPH has been struggling to find the right balance between the national language and English – a complex situation which is often referred to as one of parallel language use (Gregersen et al., 2018). This term, which was introduced in Swedish language debates around the turn of the century, appeared as a key concept in the Nordic Declaration of Language Policy issued by the Nordic Council of Ministers in 2006. It refers to the simultaneous use and development of two (or more) languages within an institution or a domain in such a way that one language will not replace the other. Thus, parallel language use is not intended as an institutional language switch. UCPH was one of the first Nordic universities to apply the terminology of parallel language use to its strategic documents. This happened in 2008 with Destination 2012 (Gregersen et al., 2018). UCPH’s endeavor to uphold and further develop both languages involves a complex mix of economic, demographic, research-related and educational aspects. UCPH is state-funded with one third of its budget

More Languages for More Students: Practice, Ideology and Management

55

provided by the Danish government to secure basic research and university administration and one third tied to the educational output, i.e. given in return by the state for number of students enrolled and exams passed. The last third of its budget comes from external research funding through national and international sources and from private as well as state-funded grants. Since the 1990s the number of internationally recruited researchers in junior as well as senior positions has risen markedly so that they now make up more than 40% of all research staff. This supports the use of English as working language in many units. While research output and international cooperation among researchers is predominantly in English, there are also research areas dominated by Danish, by a classical language or a modern language other than English. At the same time, like other Danish universities, UCPH is obliged to disseminate research to a wider Danish audience and researchers to take part in public debates about their research areas. This makes the acquisition of Danish relevant for many researchers on long-term contracts. In addition, university administration and most committee meetings take place in Danish, and BA-programs and about 50% of all MA-programs are taught in Danish (or in the language studied in foreign language programs). One important reason for maintaining Danish as the medium of instruction is to prepare students for a Danish medium labor market, including for professions like national law, medicine, clinical psychology and high school teaching. About 50% of MA programs are taught in English to attract more international full degree students and support student mobility in general (including ERASMUS and Nordic exchange programs). For most students at UCPH, tuition is free; the only students who have to pay study fees are international full degree students with a non-European or non-Nordic passport. Before English-medium instruction was introduced during the 1990s, UCPH was predominantly a monolingual Danish-medium university for about 100–150 years with English, French and German used for research publications. When founded as a small medieval university (in 1479) and for three centuries, Latin was the main formal language (Mortensen & Haberland, 2012). However, UCPH was never officially a monolingual university. Neither does the current language policy, informed by the principle of parallel language use, mean that it is now considered a bilingual university. There have always been traces of multilingualism in the UCPH mandate and communicative practices. Thus, a number of languages other than Danish and English are included in research and study programs, some of which have modern or classical languages as their core, whereas others draw on or build students’ language competence as a resource. In addition, from a demographic perspective, UCPH has always been ‘a site of multilingualism’ (Preece, 2011) because of the multilingual background and practices of its staff and students. As the only university in Denmark until 1928, it attracted students from all parts of the country, including the Nordic regions, which are or have previously been under Danish rule (i.e.

56

Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research

Greenland and Faroe Islands on the one hand, parts of Schleswig, Norway, and Iceland on the other hand). This broad student recruitment continued during the 20th century until it was supplemented by a more global composition of staff and students. Today there is still open access to universities across the Nordic region for students with a Nordic background. Parallel language use was introduced with the University’s first overall strategy in 2008. There were two main reasons for UCPH to do this. One was to strengthen the use of English for research and teaching to attract funding and people (researchers and students). The other was to maintain Danish as a language for research dissemination and academic studies in order for UCPH to fulfill its democratic and societal role. In other words, internationalization was intended to go both ways – transmitting international, English-medium research to Danish students and to a wider Danish audience on the one hand, and transmitting Danish-based research to an international audience on the other hand. Since 2008 support for both languages has become even more important as demographic changes mean that more lecturers with a non-Danish background teach in Danish and more lecturers in general, with a Danish or non-Danish background, teach in English. It is well documented that neither the use of Danish nor English for teaching is unproblematic in the UCPH context (Henriksen et al., 2019; Kirilova & Lønsmann, 2020). The role played by other languages in teaching practices and study programs has received less attention, but has nevertheless been represented in the strategic documents alongside parallel language use from its fi rst mentioning. 4 Languages Other Than Danish and English

By introducing parallel language use as a guiding principle in its 2008 overall strategy, UCPH was in line with many other Nordic universities. But the overall strategy also mentioned the role of other languages in the following supplement to the main concerns of the language policy: UCPH shall profit from the special opportunity of already carrying out research and teaching in a number of languages. Students must be given easily available opportunities to acquire competence in another foreign language and another culture than the Anglosaxon. (University of Copenhagen, 2008)

The paragraph refers to the 40+ languages that were taught through language programs or as elements of other study programs in 2008. These languages were seen by the authors of the UCPH strategy from 2008 as potential resources for students because research and teaching competence in these languages were already available at UCPH. In addition, as emphasized at the meeting at which the new strategy was launched, many of these languages perform an important traditional role in Danish education and society and/or play an important role in the modern knowledge economy. This applies to European as well as non-European languages, and for some

More Languages for More Students: Practice, Ideology and Management

57

students also to classical languages. However, during the last 20 years languages other than English and Danish have gradually become less attractive for students from primary through tertiary education with severe consequences for language competence in the general public. At UCPH, the number of foreign language programs has been reduced since the millennium, and the number of students in the foreign language programs is also declining. In addition, the number of non-language programs with an explicit language component other than Danish or English in its curriculum, e.g. reading skills in German or French, has also decreased. In certain ways, the strategy of More Languages for More Students resembles the Language Profile at Roskilde University (see Chapter 10 in this volume and also Daryai-Hansen et  al., 2017; Daryai-Hansen & Kirilova, 2019; Holmen & Risager, 2018; Larsen et al., 2016). Both are innovative by integrating language and content in non-language programs. In addition, they both focus on a Danish tradition for building on students’ competences in other languages than English and Danish during their university studies, and both include a focus on academic study skills and seek to promote outward mobility to non-English medium universities. However, there are also differences in scope and context with UCPH being a far more traditional research- and discipline-based university, whereas the educational profile at Roskilde University is problem- and project-based with a focus on cross-disciplinary activities. The UCPH initiative also reaches further out by addressing all six faculties and undergraduate and graduate students and including management and lecturers in the mapping of language needs. At Roskilde University, the Language Profile was an opportunity for undergraduate students within Humanities and Social Sciences. At UCPH the decision to launch More Languages for More Students can be seen as a step towards accepting a modest multilingualism. But how did this come about? And what was the outcome when students’ needs for languages were uncovered across study programs? This is the core part of the present chapter on UCPH language policy. When looking at the five-year period of More Languages for More Students, it is possible to identify a number of stakeholders across UCPH, advocates as well as gatekeepers, and thus to discuss drivers of change as well as barriers at a fairly traditional university with high research ambitions and a stable organizational structure. As we shall see in this chapter, the initiative produced a number of very relevant and innovative results for UCPH, and in addition, it somewhat modified our views of what counts as top-down and bottom-up processes in language policy work. Whether it will have a lasting influence on future strategies at UCPH is still an open question, but one which we shall try to address towards the end of this chapter. 5 Methodology

To analyse More Languages for More Students from the perspective of language policy processes and outcomes, we draw on three types of data

58

Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research

from the implementation of the multilingual strategy (2013–2018): results from student and lecturer surveys (see Table 3.4 (later) for an overview), minutes from dialogue meetings with study boards across the university, and evaluation reports from pilot projects where different types of language instruction were tried and evaluated. In the implementation of More Languages for More Students, surveys and dialogue meetings both served the purpose of identifying language needs among students outside of the language programs, whereas the pilot projects were a means of trying out different models for integrating language and content according to local needs and interests. This set-up of the strategy meant that a substantial part of the UCPH population was in touch with the language strategy from 2013 to 2018, either via their governance, administrative or representative function or via their status as student or lecturer from a program involved in the strategy. All in all, the project team was in contact with more than 6000 students (out of a total of around 38,000 undergraduate and graduate students), 800 lecturers (out of around 4800) and 1200 doctoral students (out of around 3000) through surveys across all six faculties (Health and Medical Sciences, Humanities, Law, Bio- and Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, and Theology). In addition, we had close to 50 dialogue meetings with directors of study programs, study boards, faculty representatives, the international office and student councillors. Finally, the project team developed and carried out 36 pilot projects, which involved around 4400 students and 700 lecturers as participants. Table 3.2 is an overview of the different UCPH-people (staff and students) which the project team was in contact with, with an indication of their function in the project: Table 3.2 UCPH-people in contact with the language strategy

MACROLEVEL

MESOLEVEL

CENTRAL UCPH

FACULTY

PROGRAM/DEPARTMENT

MANAGEMENT/ GOVERNANCE

University Board Rector and his representatives Central administration

Associate deans for education Faculty management

Heads of studies

MANAGEMENT/ LOCAL

International office Representative in steering committee

Associate deans for education Representatives in steering committee

Heads of studies Course coordinators Study boards Representatives in steering committee

GROUNDING

LECTURERS

STUDENTS MICRO-

LECTURERS

LEVEL

STUDENTS

Course coordinators Dialogue with representatives on study boards Representatives in steering committee

Dialogue with representatives on study boards Student councilors

Informants in surveys Participants in pilot projects Informants in surveys Participants in pilot projects

More Languages for More Students: Practice, Ideology and Management

59

Our dataset thus represents a complex set of voices and agency at partially overlapping levels of policy processes and outcomes, with the voices of students and lecturers, for example, representing both the microand meso-levels – but with different types of agency. For the purposes of this chapter, we have analysed minutes from dialogue meetings (representing the meso-level) as well as results from surveys and evaluation reports from pilot projects (representing the micro-level) with a view to identifying (a) both general tendencies and specific trends in language management at different levels and (b) different perspectives on translingual needs (as related to different domains, skills and disciplinary literacies). The extracts presented to illustrate these tendencies/trends/perspectives are not comprehensive, especially in terms of covering survey results, which are presented in greater coverage and in more detail elsewhere. As all authors of this chapter were part of the team that implemented More Languages for More Students, we were ‘agents’ in language policy processes ourselves and have thus analysed the data from the perspective of ‘insiders’ with intimate knowledge of both processes and outcomes and inevitably with a high degree of ‘subjectivity’. In addition to the three types of data from the implementation of the strategy, we also draw on documentary evidence, including UCPH’s overall strategies (representing the period 2008–2023), to shed more light on the macro-level policy processes that frames More Languages for More Students. We draw on these documents in an initial analysis of the genesis and phases of More Languages for More Students (Phases and Agency in the Life of a FiveYear Strategy) and in a fi nal analysis of the outcomes of the multilingual strategy (From Implementation to Policy Recommendations and an Explicit Language Policy).

6 Phases and Agency in the Life of a Five-Year Strategy

As outlined in the theoretical section, language policies are often produced through top-down procedures in which management introduces new initiatives to attract funding or cut budgets, sometimes against the interests of their own staff. The rapid introduction of English-medium instruction into Danish universities is an example of this as documented by Tange (2010, 2012) and Hultgren (2014). UCPH follows this general trend; however, as we saw, the 2008 strategy contained more than a focus on English. There was a parallel focus on Danish and a supplementary focus on other languages, and both of these elements were also brought into the strategic document by Central Management, possibly under influence of the University Board. The document was written at a time when there was a heated public discussion about the status of the Danish language in different domains of society and in particular within higher education. Between 2001 and 2008 several ministerial reports had discussed this and other language matters (e.g. Danish Language Council, 2001;

60

Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research

Ministry of Culture, 2003, 2008; Universities Denmark, 2003). The reports focused on the growing demand for English and were concerned about domain loss for Danish in academia and the disuse of other languages across Danish education. The Nordic Language Declaration from 2006 seemed to offer a solution to the Danish–English dilemma by introducing the term parallel language use (Nordic Council of Ministers, 2006), and by stating this as the main principle for UCPH it was possible to mention other languages and thus acknowledging their values without disrupting the sensitive balance between English and Danish. Not only did the Central Management and University Board send out a strategic document with these elements, they also acted upon this decision by setting up and funding the Center for Internationalisation and Parallel Language Use in 2008. The 2008 strategy was followed by a new strategy in 2012. This included a reference to the principle of parallel language use, but with no specificity concerning the languages involved. However, during the five years of this strategy (2012–2017) a number of language initiatives were taken by central management. In 2013, a cross-faculty committee was set up to investigate the role of English in UCPH administration, which led to the issue of the fi rst language policy for this part of the University in 2014. Here it is stated that Danish is the prime language of administration and management, but that English may be used if it seems more appropriate and relevant in the given situation. No other languages are mentioned, and neither is teaching or research. However, in 2012, the Dean for Humanities was approached by the Rector, who was concerned about the lack of initiatives that acted on the paragraph in the 2008 strategy about the value of other languages (quoted above). One might have expected follow up initiatives to come from either grassroots inside UCPH (i.e. language departments) or from external macro-level sources pointing to specific language needs to secure global export or Danish participation and influence in European organizations and institutions (cf. the Danish government’s Germany Strategy in 2016). But there had been no such initiatives at the University during the five years. At a meeting with faculty members and study board directors from departments with language programs at Humanities, the Rector appeared in person to emphasize the University’s interest in a multilingual language strategy, and consequently a cross-faculty committee was set up to produce a concrete proposal. During the summer of 2013, the plan was approved and funded for five years under the title of More Languages for More Students (Flere Sprog til Flere Studerende). The overall aim was to improve language skills for students outside foreign language programs, and one goal was to identify language needs among students through surveys, interviews and meetings. Another goal was to develop and set up different ways of integrating language and content according to local needs and interests. In order to do this across UCPH, it was necessary to

More Languages for More Students: Practice, Ideology and Management

61

Table 3.3 Project phases of More Languages for More Students (1) The value of other languages than English and Danish explicitly mentioned in the 2012 Strategy (dated 2008) (2) Rector’s initiative to develop this part of the Strategy into a working plan by setting up a cross-faculty committee (2012) (3) Working plan approved and funded by Central Administration/University Board (2013) (4) Steering committee set up (functioning 2013–2018) (5) Associate deans for education opening doors to their faculties by setting up meetings at faculty or departmental levels (2013–2014) (6) Meetings with study boards and/or heads of studies across UCPH (2014–2016) (7) Surveys sent out to students and lecturers (2014–2017) (8) Pilot projects developed, carried out and evaluated in cooperation with lecturers and/or heads of studies (2014–2018) (9) Report to Rector’s office and University Board on results and implications (2018)

set up not only a practical working group consisting of applied linguists from the Centre for Internationalisation and Parallel Language Use, but also a cross-faculty steering group consisting of the six associate deans for education, two heads of studies from language departments, a representative from Central Administration and two student representatives. Thus, the UCPH language strategy was developed through nine phases (see Table 3.3), the first five of which were important for organizational support and funding for the strategy whereas the next three concern the methodology used. The last phase served the double function of rounding off the strategy by summing up its results and of implying what the next steps ought to be concerning the integration of languages for teaching and learning at UCPH. In the next two sections, we present and discuss examples of policies, practices and management across the three overlapping phases of implementation (6–8), focusing fi rst on trends in language management and translingual needs as they emerge from analyses of study board meetings and surveys and next as seen from the perspective of pilot project implementation. 7 Language Management and Translingual Needs: Trends from Study Board Meetings and Surveys

Between 2014 and 2016, the project team settled visits with all study boards at UCPH. These visits had several purposes: first, to raise awareness about the strategy and its aims at the level of departmental management; second, to identify immediate needs for improvement of the students’ competences in various languages; and third, to arrange future tailor-made pilot projects aimed at strengthening students’ language competences in relation to particular educational programs. Most visits were scheduled on the agenda of a regular study board meeting and were relatively short. After each meeting, the project team (and in some cases the study board itself) produced minutes as an official record of the discussions of language

62

Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research

Table 3.4 Overview of surveys carried out as part of More Languages for More Students Number of responses

Response rate

Student surveys Outbound exchange students (all faculties) 2013–2014 2014–2015 • Faculty of Theology

407 714

44.9% 55.4%

66

77.6%

• Faculty of Social Sciences

900

13.7%

• Faculty of Law

561

11.9%

• Medicine

904

23.9%

• Faculty of Humanities (domestic students and lecturers)

2118

22.2%

• Doctoral students (all faculties, domestic and international)

1213

• Faculty of Science (international students only)

363

38.5% 34%

Lecturer surveys • Faculty of Law • Faculty of Humanities

67

18.9%

250

32.1%

needs and possible future projects. At the same time, many of the discussions initiated by student representatives at the study board meetings shaped the focus of the needs analysis surveys that More Languages for More Students developed and administered at different faculties (see Table 3.4). The purpose of the surveys was to identify the foreign language skills students at UCPH needed as part of their education, in connection with studies abroad, and in relation to the labor market. In the following section, we fi rst discuss excerpts from the minutes from the study board meetings that illustrate both general tendencies and specific trends in the (language) management and policy at different levels (e.g. heads of studies, lecturers and students). We then present examples from the survey data that show translingual needs related to different domains, skills and disciplinary literacies. We will not cover all survey results – but see Daryai-Hansen and Kirilova (2019) for a more detailed review of the quantitative data and www.cip.ku.dk for research reports in Danish. 7.1 Gatekeeping at the meso-level: Perspectives from the Heads of Studies

The idea that language plays an important role in acquiring specialized knowledge in every field was generally appreciated by all participants at the meetings. At the same time, however, some heads of studies seemed to downplay the need for improving the students’ language competences. They argued that such attention to language was either too time-consuming, too

More Languages for More Students: Practice, Ideology and Management

63

difficult to implement in the already densely packed curriculum, or generally unnecessary. Here are some examples taken from the minutes of the meetings attended by the language strategy team: (1) The Study Board agreed that the focus on improving the linguistic qualifications of the candidates would be a good initiative, they however found it difficult to add more to the existing curriculum and work load of the students. (Minutes by Human Biology, 20 May 2014) (2) It was generally acknowledged that students at Political Science might need French and German but there was no immediate interest in taking up initiatives in that area (…). Use of English is not considered problematic to an extent that it requires an effort. (Head of Studies at Political Science, 27 April 2015, our minutes & translation)

The fi rst example reveals that the Study Board at Human Biology did not consider improved language competences (in whatever language) a necessity for the students – rather they saw it as an unwelcome burden that will increase the work load instead of minimizing it. We interpret this as a prototypical gatekeeping statement from the management, who here uses the already existing capacity as an argument against investing in further language competences – although this may essentially ease the existing ‘load’ by supporting students in meeting the literacy requirements embedded in the curriculum. In the second example, the Head of Studies in Political Science naturalizes English as the only resource (other than Danish) from which the students may benefit and rejects possible problems around English. English is here constructed as the default language as well as a language that everybody masters regardless of background and study area. Furthermore, although skills in French and German were ‘generally acknowledged’ as something that students might need, the Study Board at that point decided that they had no interest in initiating language support for their students. Such views were frequently expressed at the meso-level of management at the university and were in fact exemplary of the resistance towards an increased focus on language support for students when we came across these in dialogue meetings. Our impression was that management at many departments – certainly not surprisingly – was concerned with maintaining existing structures (perhaps also from a fi nancial point of view as to keep track of budgets and students’ credit points) and therefore downplayed any potential (linguistic and other) problems. 7.2 Needs from below: Voices of student representatives

The student representatives at the study board meetings often expressed rather different perspectives from those of management. On several occasions, we documented cases showing that although the heads of studies had denied potential needs for strengthening students’ language

64

Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research

competences, students eagerly pointed to various urgent problems related to the lack of (particular) language skills in their study area, for example at a meeting with a teaching committee at the Faculty of Science: (3) The discussion revolved around English in particular – everybody agreed that English was a necessity but not a problem. Only after the students brought up some problems, the need for language support became evident… The graduate level, which is taught in English, is a problem for those who choose to become high school teachers because they will have to teach in Danish, but they have been socialized into the field through English. This is a general problem at the Faculty of Science. (Teaching Committee at Mathematics, 24 April 2015, our notes and translation) Example 3 illustrates that according to the students, the recurrent lecturing in English has contributed to building up an English (academic) disciplinary literacy. While this has certainly been useful for strengthening (field specific) English skills, it is experienced as a problem for those who are going to work professionally in Danish after they fi nish their studies (e.g. as high school teachers). Similarly, at the Study Board meeting of Medicine and Technology (26.11.2014), one professor seemed worried that although students become fluent in English terminology through their studies, it might affect their work in a Danish context, particularly at hospitals and in communication with patients. Evidently, a translinguistic repertoire (strongly influenced by English) is here addressed as a problem for performing a job in Denmark. From the point of view of language policy and power tensions created by different agents, it is also interesting to consider the opposition between management and students. In the beginning, the management tended to almost overrule the voices of the other participants (e.g. everybody agreed) and only after the students pointed to the imbalance between English and Danish, the management actually allowed More Languages for More Students to distribute surveys and investigate potential problems. Perhaps this re-confirms that the gatekeeping process, which we discussed in Examples 1 and 2, concerned maintaining existing (educational and economic) structures rather than counteracting students’ needs and initiatives. The students’ voices were in many cases heard and appreciated. At the Study Board meeting at Medicine, students also pointed to problems with reading and writing in English as part of their studies. In their opinion, one reason for not articulating these needs was the assumption that it was considered a taboo if students were not good at English: (4) Many students of Medicine have difficulties in reading scientific textbooks and especially articles in English. A huge part of them fear reading in English and if possible, opt out of choosing textbooks in English (…). The problem is amplified by the fact that all lectures at

More Languages for More Students: Practice, Ideology and Management

65

the BA-level are exclusively in Danish, while the textbooks are in English. This challenges the understanding of the technical stuff because it requires from the students to have full understanding of the terminology in both Danish and English. (Student of Medicine, our minutes and translation, 2 December 2014) This quotation points to the same imbalance between English and Danish – this time reversed: if students develop disciplinary literacy through Danish (understanding the technical stuff ), it will entail effort to acquire the same disciplinary literacy in English. Danish and English are again constructed as competing resources (see also Darling & Dervin, this volume). Considering Airey’s notion of a disciplinary literacy related to academic, societal and work contexts, it seems clear that the required literacies in Danish and English concern different domains: while English has been used to build up academic literacy, Danish is needed for the work-related literacy. These are in fact two different competences, repertoires or ‘emplacements’ (Canagarajah, 2018) and should entail separate efforts. However, the problem seems to be that students perceive Danish and English as bound linguistic entities with bound literacies. This ideology may prevent students from articulating strategic needs for competences across languages and domains, and likewise prevent staff from investing in courses that support (strategic) translingual needs. Nevertheless, the example shows that such needs are present and have to be handled. We elaborate on this below. 7.3 Translingual needs

Although English and Danish played a central role in the discussions at different faculties, students also mentioned needs for other foreign languages, especially in relation to exchange studies. For example, it became clear that students generally aimed for English-speaking universities for studies abroad, because the language skills they had acquired during secondary education seemed insufficient. Furthermore, a recurring theme in all surveys was that approximately 1/3 of the student respondents at each faculty (and 1/2 at the Faculty of Theology) claimed to have experienced problems with academic language (primarily English, but also Danish, and in some cases German and French). Problems occurred already at the undergraduate level but gained speed during graduate studies, which several faculties offered almost exclusively in English. This sudden transition was experienced as highly problematic by a number of students. For example, one student of Political Science who considered himself fluent in English wrote that he was genuinely worried about taking an exam in English with an undergraduate degree in Danish. Thus, he experienced a lack of bridging between undergraduate and graduate courses. Anthropology students also reported that they had to hand in essays in English although they have never received training in academic English.

66

Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research

In terms of other languages than English, students pointed to French and German as important resources. Consider the following three examples from Social Sciences students: (5) My limited French was a problem while I was on an exchange, both academically and socially. It is problematic that the university seems to think that language competencies include English only. No one is impressed by the fact that a graduate student speaks English – we’re expected to. Foreign languages today go beyond Danish and English. (6) It would be great if [the University of Copenhagen] offered courses in German. We miss out on a lot of knowledge by relying on English only. It is a shame. (7) It should be a requirement that the subject’s classics are read in the original language: German, English, French, if one has ambitions on behalf of the students. These comments clearly show that the students at the Faculty of Social Sciences were aware of the hegemony of English in academia as well as in the outside world. They referred to the practice of using English as the only resource as ‘unimpressive’ and ‘unambitious’. The survey data further indicated that studies abroad seemed to function as eye-opening experiences for many students who suddenly came to realize that translingual literacy was not only convenient but also meaningful for performing well academically. The student who suggested that it should be a requirement to read curricula in German and French (Example 7) had just finished exchange studies at Humboldt University. In comparison to the programs he had followed there, he found it much less satisfactory that UCPH did not require students to read texts in the original language. Nonetheless, approximately 2/3 of the lecturers at the Faculty of Humanities reported having excluded texts in other languages than Danish (as well as difficult texts in English) from the curriculum because their experience was that the students could not read them. Thus, the ideology of Danish as the most important language in Denmark and English as the only other academic resource at the University was to some extent reinforced by the lectures and passed on to many students, although many lecturers believed the texts in other languages were central to their discipline. After some of the students had been acquainted with other teaching traditions from foreign universities, they came to realize that translingual competence was certainly an asset (as also reported in Darling & Dervin, this volume). This is similar to the experience reported in detail by several of the students from Roskilde University in Chapter 10 (this volume). Some of these mention the overlap between gaining new language perspectives and new ways of teaching and learning (e.g. voiced by Julie and Karen in Chapter 10) whereas others are more focused on the multidimensional textual interpretation made possible through the links between language, identity and location (e.g. Eskil

More Languages for More Students: Practice, Ideology and Management

67

and Lena in Chapter  10). Finally, Eva talks about ‘The French Bonus’ which refers to two insights she has gained through developing her French into a higher level: one is that ‘meaning is clearer in the original language’; the other that it is possible to ‘access knowledge which is not available in Danish and English’. To sum up, the examples from the study board meetings and the surveys illustrate that language needs were addressed and tackled differently at the different levels. At management level, problems with language skills tended to be unnoticed or ignored. This concerned both English and other foreign languages (mainly French and German). Especially written academic English skills were expected from the students but almost no courses were offered to support, e.g. the transition from Danish to English at the Master’s level. The surveys from the Faculty of Social Sciences, the Faculty of Humanities and the Faculty of Law showed that although most language needs were related to written academic English, there were explicit needs for several other foreign languages – and even more so – for particular literacy repertoires in these languages. This substantiates the notion of decentring as an evolving linguistic practice. The students seemed to demonstrate a functional approach to language as a set of different skills (writing, reading, interaction) and allocated different needs to these skills: e.g. English for writing, German and French for reading, and Spanish for interaction. Students also requested opportunities for getting ‘helping packages’ or acquiring ‘language-technical skills’ (examples not shown here) in relation to particular study programs. Generally, many students were interested in improving their foreign language skills and academic repertoires and saw it as the university’s responsibility to develop free of charge language packages that could prepare them not only for the study program but also for the job market afterwards. 8 Translingual Needs and Practices: Trends from Pilot Projects

In addition to identifying language needs among students outside of the language programs, the strategy had, as one of its goals, to develop and set up different models for integrating language and content according to local needs and interests identified and recognized ‘from below’. As shown above, the pilot project implementation ran parallel to, and was closely related to, the identification of language needs through dialogue meetings and depended on being met with agency by teachers of specific courses. As the strategy involved all study boards at the university in the process of deciding which languages, language skills and disciplinary language needs to target through pilot projects, the outcome of this process contributes to an understanding of the translingual needs and practices that were recognized across the university. In this section, we explore trends in translingual needs across the 36 pilot projects, in terms of languages, language skills and disciplinary literacies.

68

Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research

In line with the trends observed in survey results and meetings with study boards, the pilot project implementation reflects a dominant role for language needs related to academic English and/or Danish, especially as concerns writing and to a lesser extent reading. Thus, 18 projects focused on English, and 18 projects on other languages: Arabic, Chinese, Classical Greek, Danish, German, French, Italian, Latin and Spanish. The choice of language stems from different needs related to the students’ career prospects, to their present interests in doing field work or studying abroad, to their educational experience with disciplinary language use and wish to improve study skills and fi nally to the opportunity of accessing texts in other languages than English and Danish. The projects fall into two major groups: projects which aim at developing the language and study skills which students need in order to pursue their general study program, and projects for students who wish to specialize or tone their education in a direction which requires specific language skills. Most likely, the need to develop the fi rst group of projects means that many students enter university without the necessary language qualifications to build their disciplinary language during their studies at UCPH. This mainly concerns written Danish and English, but in some study programs at Humanities or Theology also reading proficiency in German and French. The second group of projects are not connected to general requirements within study programs, but more to an added value stemming from UCPH aspirations to promote mobility, international cooperation and knowledge sharing, prepare (some of its) students for a global labor market and even attract what is referred to as ‘talented students’ (in the most recent UCPH strategy called Strategy 2023). Collectively, the results of the implementation of More Languages for More Students – across study board meetings, survey results and pilot projects – point to a developing practice of decentring expressed through a diverse set of translingual needs. This defies any one-dimensional role being assigned to English in relation to the university’s programs and challenges the assumption of English as the only or default language of relevance and significance for these programs. In the fi nal analysis, we take a brief look at the fi nal phase of More Languages for More Students, which involved taking this complex set of results back to the macro level and into language policy work at UCPH. 9 From Implementation to Policy Recommendations and an Explicit Language Policy

In the fi nal phase of More Languages for More Students (October 2017–June 2018), the project team collaborated with the Steering Committee to present the results and implications of the strategy in a report to the Rector’s office and University Board with five overall recommendations for future language strategy work at the institution. The key

More Languages for More Students: Practice, Ideology and Management

69

recommendation to the University Board was to continue the work of More Languages for More Students by developing a strategy for language in relation to education as part of an overall language strategy for the university (see recommendation (1) in Table 3.5). Both the fi rst and the second recommendations align closely with Denmark’s first national language strategy for the educational system as a whole, which calls for local university strategies that focus on ‘how languages can be integrated with disciplinary competences’ (The Danish Government, 2017: 9, our translation), and mentions More Languages for More Students as an example of this. However, the university’s current strategy lends itself less obviously to such a strategic focus on languages in education with its emphasis on ‘attracting, developing and retaining academic talent’. It does, however, retain a focus on parallel language use in relation to both employees and students as reflected in one of its statements of intent: ‘We will promote a work and study environment of parallel language use in order to attract and retain talent’ (University of Copenhagen, 2018: 26). This statement formed the basis for setting up a working group under the current strategy responsible for drafting an explicit language policy for the university. In the initial stage of defi ning the scope of the language policy project, the endorsement of the recommendations listed in Table 3.5 by the University Board played an important role in ensuring that language(s) in relation to education became part of the scope of the language policy project and has remained an important argument for maintaining a focus on languages other than English throughout the process of formulating the actual language policy. The University Board defi ned the two overall goals of the language policy working group as providing a common set of principles for (1) language in relation to education and the offering of programs, including the integration of language and content, and (2) staff in the multilingual workplace, with a focus on parallel language use in administration and management. In accordance with this, the drafting of Table 3.5 Main recommendations of the strategy (UCPH, no date, our translation) Based on the experiences from and results of More Languages for More Students, the strategy recommends that UCPH: (1) as part of an overall language strategy, develops a language strategy specifically targeted to education. The individual faculties should be engaged in the process of developing and implementing the strategy. (2) offers integration of language and content, where relevant (3) prioritizes content teachers’ foreign language competencies (4) prioritizes content teachers’ pedagogic competencies in regard to teaching through a foreign language (5) gives particular attention to educational initiatives targeting (a) Academic English and Danish (at all faculties) (b) German, French, and eventually other languages such as Spanish, Latin/Ancient Greek, Chinese, Arabic (at the faculties of Humanities, Social Sciences, Theology, Law)

70

Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research

the policy was set up with two working groups responsible for generating input for each of the two areas included, and a Steering Committee responsible for formulating the language policy based on that input and for taking the policy back to management. The working groups, consisting of a Chairman and eight members, and the Steering Committee itself, had representation from all six faculties. But the macro- and meso-levels of the institution (e.g. deans, heads of department, heads of studies, central administration) dominated, with only a single student representative in one of the working groups. Given the focus of the university’s current strategy, it is perhaps not surprising that a great deal of the discussion – both in the working group meetings and in the broader university response – has focused on the inclusion of international academic staff and the question of whether they should be able to teach in Danish. Nevertheless, a focus on student needs in relation to English as well as other languages remain part of outcome of the language policy process. 10 Discussion and Conclusion

More Languages for More Students engaged stakeholders at many different levels of the institution in a discussion of needs and solutions. As we argued previously, language policies in general and at UCPH in particular are often produced through top-down procedures in which management introduces new initiatives to attract funding or cut budgets, sometimes against the interests of their own staff. In More Languages for More Students, however, the top-down initiation and the meso- and micro-level implementation of the Strategy brought out a diverse set of translingual practices and needs, more or less successfully accommodating to voices both from below and (perhaps less obviously) from above and representing multiple languages, multiple language skills and multiple disciplinary literacies. We exemplified how English – as in many other places around the world – was construed as ‘the default language’ (e.g. Mortensen & Haberland, 2012) as well as a language that everybody was supposed to master regardless of background and study area. However, before the strategy few courses were offered (at departmental level) to support English or any other linguistic repertoires. One reason for that could be that the university management did not consider linguistic support a university business. If students enter university without the necessary language qualifications to build their disciplinary language during their studies, it is rarely seen as a university problem. This might be the reason why challenges with language competences tended to be ignored at the meso-level of faculty/department. However, the students’ needs for strengthening a wide variety of languages and literacies, which we analysed as a move of decentring from English as the language of Academia as well as an understanding of literacy as bound to a single language and a single (academic) area, were

More Languages for More Students: Practice, Ideology and Management

71

obvious and easy to document. The students seemed to have a clear focus on how different skills would improve their studies and allocated different needs to particular disciplinary skills. In their opinion it was the university’s responsibility to develop free of charge language packages that could prepare them not only for the study program but also for the job market afterwards. Some of these complex interests have been difficult to impart on subsequent work at UCPH with formulating an explicit language policy. This has been a predominantly top-down process characterized by more covert means, intentions and interests, and, not least, by a more limited representation and inclusion of policy agents from all levels, especially representing the micro-level (students and lecturers). Nevertheless, the move towards an explicit language policy is a positive development, and the fact that student language needs are mentioned in the language policy places an obligation on the university to act on these in the actual implementation. Indeed, three out of ten paragraphs focus on students’ Danish, English and ‘other languages where relevant’. Although formulated in a rather modest manner, this is perhaps the major achievement of the strategy More Languages for More Students as it decenters the hitherto hegemonic status of English and opens up for including other less pronounced but not less needed linguistic practices. References Airey, J. (2011) The disciplinary literacy discussion matrix: A heuristic tool for initiating collaboration in higher education. Across the Disciplines – A Journal of Language, Learning and Academic Writing 8 (3), 1–9. Blommaert, J. (2010) The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blommaert, J. and Backus, A. (2013) Superdiverse repertoires and the individual. In I. de Saint-Georges and J.-J. Weber (eds) Multilingualism and Multimodality: Current Challenges for Educational Studies (pp. 11–32). Rotterdam: Sense. Canagarajah, S. (2013) Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations. New York: Routledge. Canagarajah, S. (2018) Translingual practice as spatial repertoires: Expanding the paradigm beyond structuralist orientations. Applied Linguistics 39 (1), 31–54. Creese, A. and Blackledge, A. (2015) Translanguaging and identity in educational settings. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 35, 20–35. Dafouz, E. and Smit, U. (2016) Towards a dynamic conceptual framework for Englishmedium education in multilingual university settings. Applied Linguistics 37 (3), 397–415. Danish Government (2017) Strategi for styrkelse af fremmedsprog i uddannelsessystemet [Strategy for strengthening languages in education]. See https://www.regeringen.dk/ publikationer-og-aftaletekster/strategi-for-styrkelse-af-fremmedsprog-i-uddannelses systemet/ (accessed May 2021). Danish Language Council (2001) Det danske sprogs status i 1990erne med særligt henblik på domænetab. [The status of the Danish language in the 1990s with special reference to domain loss]. Copenhagen: Dansk Sprognævn. See https://dsn.dk/udgivelser/sprognaevnets-udgivelser/sprognaevnets-skriftserie-1/det-danske-sprogs-status (accessed May 2021).

72

Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research

Daryai-Hansen, P., Barfod, S. and Schwarz, L. (2017) A call for (trans)languaging: The Language Profi les at Roskilde University. In C.M. Mazak and K.S. Carroll (eds) Translanguaging Practices in Higher Education: Beyond Monolingual Ideologies. (pp. 29–49). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Daryai-Hansen, P. and Kirilova, M. (2019) Signs of plurilingualism: Current plurilingual countermoves in Danish higher education. International Journal of Bias, Identity and Diversities in Education (IJBIDE) 4 (2), 43–58. Fabricius, A., Mortensen, J. and Haberland, H. (2017) The lure of internationalization: Paradoxical discourses of transnational student mobility, linguistic diversity and cross-cultural exchange. Higher Education 73, 577–595. García, O. and Li, W. (2014) Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gregersen, F. (ed.) (2014) Hvor parallelt: Om parallellspråkighet på Nordens universitet [How parallel: On parallel language use at Nordic Universities]. Copenhagen: Nordic Council of Ministers. See https://www.norden.org/da/publication/hvor-parallelt (accessed May 2021). Gregersen, F., Josephson, O., Kristoffersen, G., Östman, J.-O., Holmen, A. and Londen, M. (2018) More parallel, please! 11 anbefalinger til mønsterpraksis for parallelsproglighed på nordiske universiteter [More parallel, please! Best practice of parallel language use at Nordic Universities: 11 recommendations]. Copenhagen: Nordic Council of Ministers. See https://norden.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A12 03288&dswid=789 (accessed May 2021). Grin, F. (2012) Economic analysis of language policy and planning. In C.A. Chapelle (ed.) The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics (pp. 1–4). London: Blackwell Publishing. Henriksen, B., Holmen, A. and Kling, J. (2019) English Medium Instruction in Multilingual and Multicultural Universities: Academics’ Voices from the Northern European Context. Abingdon: Routledge. Holmen, A. (2016) Parallel language strategy. In N. van Deusen-Scholl (ed.) Second and Foreign Language Education (pp. 301–311). Cham: Springer. Holmen, A. (2018) Shaping a multilingual language policy: Gatekeepers and drivers of change. In M. Siiner, F. Hult and T. Kupisch (eds) Contemporary Perspectives on Language Acquisition Planning (pp. 137–154). Cham: Springer. Holmen, A. (2020) Integrating content and language: The role of other languages than English in international universities. In S. Dimova and J. Kling (eds) Integrating Content and Language in Multilingual Universities (pp. 37–50). Cham: Springer. Holmen, A. and Risager, K. (2018) Det flersprogede danske universitet [The multilingual Danish university]. In T.K. Christensen (ed.) Dansk til det 21. århundrede – sprog og samfund (pp. 153–170). Copenhagen: U Press. Hult, F. and Källkvist, M. (2016) Global flows in local language planning: Articulating parallel language use in Swedish university policies. Current Issues in Language Planning 17 (1), 56–71. Hultgren, A.K., Gregersen, F. and Thøgersen, J. (eds) (2014) English in Nordic Universities: Ideologies and Practices. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hultgren, A.K. (2014) Whose parallellingualism? Overt and covert ideologies in Danish university language policies. Multilingua 33 (1-2), 61–87. Johnson D.C. (2013) Language Policy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Jørgensen, J.N., Karrebæk, M.S., Madsen, L.M. and Møller, J.S. (2015) Polylanguaging in superdiversity. In K. Arnaut, B. Rampton, J. Blommaert and M. Spotti (eds) Language and Superdiversity (pp. 147–164). New York: Routledge. Kaplan, R.B. and Baldauf, R.B. (1997) Language Planning: From Practice to Theory. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Kirilova, M. and Lønsmann, D. (2020) Dansk – nøglen til arbejde? Ideologier om sprogbrug og sproglæring i to arbejdskontekster i Danmark [Danish – the key to the

More Languages for More Students: Practice, Ideology and Management

73

labour market? Ideologies about language use and language learning in two work contexts in Denmark]. Nordand – Nordisk tidsskrift for andrespråksforskning 15 (1), 37–57. Kling Soren, J. (2013) Teacher identity in English-medium instruction: Teacher cognitions from a Danish tertiary education context. Doctoral dissertation, University of Copenhagen. Larsen, S. (2013) Re-contextualizing academic writing in English: Case studies of international students in Denmark. Doctoral dissertation, University of Copenhagen. Larsen, S., Daryai-Hansen, P. and Holmen, A. (2016) Flersproget internationalisering på Københavns Universitet og Roskilde Universitet. Andre sprog end engelsk [Multilingual internationalisation at University of Copenhagen and Roskilde University. Languages other than English]. Sprogforum 22 (62), 51–57. Makoni, S. and Pennycook, A. (2007) Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Marshall, S. and Moore, D. (2018) Plurilingualism amid the panoply of lingualisms: Addressing critiques and misconceptions in education. International Journal of Multilingualism 15 (1), 19–34. McCarty, T.L. (2011) Introducing ethnography and language policy. In T.L. McCarty (ed.) Ethnography and Language Policy (pp. 1–28). Abingdon: Routledge. McCarty, T.L., Collins, J. and Hopson, R.K. (2011) Dell Hymes and the new language policy studies: Update from an underdeveloped country. Anthropology & Education Quarterly 42 (4), 335–363. Ministry of Culture (2003) Sprog på spil – et udspil til en dansk sprogpolitik [Languages at stake – towards a Danish language policy]. Danish Ministry of Culture. Ministry of Culture (2008) Sprog til tiden. Rapport fra den danske regerings sprogudvalg [Languages just in time. Report from the language committee under the Danish government]. Danish Ministry of Culture. Mortensen, J. and Haberland, H. (2012) English – the new Latin of academia? Danish universities as a case. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 216, 175–197. Nissen, C.F.R. (2018) Language policy in reality: A study of language use in two Englishtaught courses at University of Copenhagen. Language Policy 15, 187–199. Nordic Council of Ministers (2006) Deklaration om nordisk språkpolitik. [Declaration on a Nordic Language Policy]. See http://norden.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pi d=diva2%3A700895&dswid=6296 (accessed May 2021). Pennycook, A. and Otsuji, E. (2019) Metrolingualism: Language in the City. Abingdon: Routledge. Piaget, J. (2000, orig. 1962) Commentary on Vygotsky’s criticisms of Language and thought of the child and Judgement and reasoning in the child. New Ideas in Psychology 18 (2-3), 241–259. Preece, S. (2011) Universities in the Anglophone centre: Sites of multilingualism. Applied Linguistics Review 2 (1), 121–146. Risager, K. (2012) Language hierarchies at the international university. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 216, 111–130. Romero, Y. (2017) Developing an intersectional framework: Engaging the decenter in language studies. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies 14, 320–346. Said, E.W. (1993) Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto & Windus. Schiff man, H. (1996) Linguistic Culture and Language Policy. New York: Routledge. Shohamy, E.G. (2006) Language Policy: Hidden Agendas and New Approaches. New York: Routledge. Spolsky, B. (2004) Language Policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spolsky, B. (2019) A modifi ed and enriched theory of language policy (and management). Language Policy 18, 323–338. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-018-9489-z

74

Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research

Tange, H. (2010) Caught in the Tower of Babel: University lecturers’ experiences with internationalization. Language and Intercultural Communication 10 (2), 137–149. Tange, H. (2012) Organising language at the international university: Three principles of linguistic organization. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 33 (3), 287–300. Universities Denmark (2003) Sprogpolitik på de danske universiteter: Rapport med anbefalinger [Language policy at Danish universities: Report with recommendations]. By Lauridsen, K. et  al. Rektorkollegiet. See https://forskning.ruc.dk/da/publications/ sprogpolitik-p%C3%A5-de-danske-universiteter-rapport-med-anbefalinger (accessed May 2021). University of Copenhagen (2008) Destination 2012. See http://www.e-pages.dk/ku/236 (accessed January 2021). University of Copenhagen (2012) 2016 – Københavns Universitets Strategi. See https:// nyheder.ku.dk/alle_nyheder/2011/2011.12/strategi/laes-mere/111206_Strategi_2016. pdf (accessed January 2021). University of Copenhagen (2018) Talent and Cooperation – Strategy 2023. See https:// about.ku.dk/strategy2023/download-pdf/strategy_2023_UK_print.pdf (accessed January 2021). University of Copenhagen (no date) Anbefalinger [Recommendations]. See https://cip. ku.dk/projekter-og-samarbejdsaftaler/sprogstrategisk-satsning/konklusioner/ anbefalinger/ (accessed January 2021).

4 Glimpses Into the ‘Language Galaxy’ of International Universities: International Students’ Multilingual and Translanguaging Experiences and Strategies at a Top Finnish University Deborah Charlotte Darling and Fred Dervin

1 Introduction

The position of English as a ‘hypercentral language’ (de Swaan, 2001) has intensified through the internationalisation of higher education around the world. Other languages have also increasingly entered international universities. At least this is the impression one could get by visiting the website of the institution that serves as a case study in this chapter. In December 2020, the university posted a video on their website entitled ‘Season’s greetings’, which was described as follows: Our university’s staff and students are an international scientific community. Of the University of Helsinki’s teachers and researchers, 26% are from outside Finland. The University had 1,970 international degree students in 2019. On our Season’s greetings video, our students and staff share their greetings in multiple languages.

Although this might give a positive image of linguistic inclusion and care, students’ choice of languages to use and study while on higher education programmes does not necessarily reflect linguistic diversity.

75

76

Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research

In anglophone countries, such as the United Kingdom, languages other than English are frequently seen as languages for the home and not for education, resulting in subtractive-bilingualism where English is dominant and the home language is viewed as offering very little for formal domains (Preece, 2019). In contrast, ‘prestigious’ languages are seen as a resource (De Costa, 2019). The elevation of English, alongside a limited number of other languages in education, can be termed elite multilingualism in that they are often pursued by well-educated or elite groups of people (De Costa, 2019). In Europe, a number of official European languages are also featured in higher education institutions and tend to be promoted at the expense of other ‘smaller’ languages. In previous studies of multilingualism in higher education settings in Europe (e.g. de Toffoli, 2015; Gajo et al., 2013; Moore, 2016), there has been an emphasis on the multilingual profi les and observed behaviour of the students in their learning environments. These demonstrate how students navigate their way through learning tasks using their language repertoires regardless of the language policy. In contrast, this chapter draws upon focus group data in which master’s students, from China, Croatia, Cyprus, Ecuador, India, Mexico, Singapore, Turkey and Vietnam, who are studying at a top Finnish university, discuss the ways in which they use their languages. They describe and give examples of their language learning, language use and translanguaging practices both inside and outside the university. Through discourse analysis of the focus groups, we identify multilingualism and especially translanguaging as naturally occurring phenomena (Canagarajah, 2011) that happen behind the scenes to support academic study. We argue that the analysis can show how language transcends place in the transnational lives of international students (Canagarajah, 2017). What is more, the premise of this chapter is that un/ planned translanguaging in university teaching has the potential to decentre knowledge by challenging the role of dominant languages (García, 2009) in higher education. In this chapter, decentring goes hand in hand with language practices in the European, rather than the global context, using the University of Helsinki, Finland, as an example. To us, decentring refers to moments when multilingual speakers start taking (implicit and/or explicit) steps to disrupt hegemonic language practices and to enrich the(ir) educational landscape with, for example, discussions around alternative epistemologies through the use of other languages. The data allow answers to the questions of the position of the students’ own languages and identities within the host communities, the languages that international students choose to learn, the way they use their languages in their transnational lives and how their languages are potentially incorporated into their studies through personal and institutional agency. This chapter identifies instances where language hegemonies are

Glimpses Into the ‘Language Galaxy’ of International Universities

77

undermined (explicitly and/or implicitly) through planned and unplanned episodes of translanguaging by addressing the questions: • •

What are the positions of the students’ languages in the context under review and which languages do they choose to use and learn? How do the students use their linguistic repertoires both socially, and to further their academic work?

2 Language Galaxies and Constellations as Tools for Examining ‘Underground’ Multilingualism

The language galaxy is a metaphor used by de Swaan (2001) to capture the complexity of the global language system which comprises 5000– 6000 named and unnamed languages that are connected by multitudes of speakers. To explain the language choices made by nations, communities and individuals, as they relate to language monopoly, exclusion, mobility, abandonment and power, de Swaan developed a model that ascribes a Q-value to all languages in the galaxy. The Q-value is a number given for the communication value of a language and is based on the prevalence and centrality of a language, or a language repertoire, as a proportion of all speakers of that language, or those with overlapping repertoires within the galaxy. This galaxy of languages and their Q-values can also be visualised as a pyramid with today’s hypercentral language, English, at the apex followed by twelve supercentral languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Malay, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swahili) that use English as a communication language. Underneath, there are approximately 100 central languages which are spoken by 95% of the global population, who use the supercentral languages for communication. Finally, at the base of the pyramid, there are the peripheral languages which constitute 98% of all languages and are spoken by 10% of the global population, who use the central languages for communication. To explain the existence of a local rather than the global pyramid, de Swaan uses the metaphor of constellations to describe regional and national contexts, which in turn can be applied to even smaller contexts, such as a university. If the language galaxy proposed by de Swaan (2001) is mapped onto the present context, the University of Helsinki (UH), 275 native speakers of the hypercentral language, 1006 native speakers of supercentral languages (excluding English) and 3163 native speakers of 75 central languages and peripheral languages (excluding Finnish) can be found. These figures are based on data provided by the operations management of the UH (T. Kangas, personal communication, 26 June, 2020) and relate only to the self-declared ‘fi rst language’ of undergraduate and postgraduate

78

Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research

degree students in 2019 and disregards, for example, multilingualism. If the data included exchange students and visiting doctoral students, the constellation might be slightly larger. The small constellation of the UH is similar to the entire galaxy but with a shift in the hypercentral and supercentral languages. The UH is de jure a bilingual university that must use the national languages, Finnish and Swedish, as administrative and teaching languages (Universities Act 558/2009), but it also has a trilingual language policy which includes English as an academic lingua franca for internationalisation purposes (University of Helsinki, 2014). Consequently, the hypercentral languages at UH are Finnish and also English, which is typically used by the international student population to interact with all others in the university. The supercentral languages are Finnish and English, but also Swedish whose speakers would often use Finnish or English for communication with the wider university (Saarinen, 2020). All other languages in the UH constellation can be considered central and peripheral although particular faculties may have different Q-values for the remaining languages. The UH language constellation represents a resource of not only languages but also worldviews, intercultural perspectives and ‘glocal’ (global + local) knowledge that seem to be largely untapped in the process of learning at the university (Dervin & Yuan, 2021). This reflects other university contexts (see Preece, 2019). The following section discusses the relationship between translanguaging and decentring language practices and epistemologies in higher education. 3 Translanguaging for Decentring in Higher Education

Translanguaging can be understood, among others, as a classroom pedagogy, a theory of language in use and a tool for transformation. Mazak (2017) charts the development of translanguaging in relation to these three perspectives. The term was introduced by Cen Williams in Wales (UK) in the 1990s to describe a classroom approach where the receptive and productive languages are different in order to support the development of both national languages, Welsh and English. The term was then adopted by Ofelia García in the late 2000s for the American context in relation to Spanish and English, and by Li Wei in the London context in the 2010s in relation to Chinese and English. For these scholars, translanguaging describes an existing practice in education whereby pupils and students naturally use all their languages for meaning-making. Finally, translanguaging has been linked with transformation whereby the traditional way of viewing language and epistemologies is disrupted, so they are seen as fluid rather than static and nationally bound. Research on translanguaging seems to have mostly concentrated on primary education and on bilingual pupils, whereas higher education and multilingualism has been less of a focus (Mazak, 2017).

Glimpses Into the ‘Language Galaxy’ of International Universities

79

The literature on higher education in the European context that takes translanguaging and social justice as a starting point appears to be very thin. Nevertheless, there are studies that home in on the use of the linguistic repertoires of students on university courses, which are couched in the pragmatic dimensions of multilingualism that can be understood as translanguaging in the sense of languaging and pedagogic approaches. For example, using the language diary method, de Bres and Franziskus (2014) investigate how many languages are typically used by 24 university students, who are taking a course on multilingualism at the University of Luxembourg, to read, take notes, and listen to others. Working from video and audio recordings provided by a group of four students (two Catalan, one Belgian and one Turkish) at a Catalonian university, Moore (2016) observes how the Catalan students break from the English language policy to negotiate the meaning of vocabulary items. She also notes how the students use their own languages to make notes on a text written in English that they are planning to present to their class. Interactions between students and lecturers are also analysed by Moore et al. (2012) who examine the way lecturers code-switch for the students to aid knowledge construction and accommodate their needs. These studies all highlight the benefits of using more than one language, which in Moore et al. (2012) are: • • • •

avoiding simplifying content; having greater interaction with the students; drawing attention to particular aspects of content to facilitate understanding; and translating terminology.

Multilingual programmes that seek to capitalise on the benefits of using the students’ full linguistic repertoires to prepare for the realities of professional life have been described and evaluated in the French context (Starkey-Perret & Narcy-Combes, 2017) and the Finnish context (Kyppö et  al., 2015). The course in France combined language studies with a group research project on a logistics problem within a given business. The aim was for the students to develop multilingual working skills and content knowledge, with guidance from language and content teachers. In Finland, the aim of the multilingual course was to put the students in a situation where they were required to advance their skills in two languages in which they had only partial proficiency. The course involved input on themes such as interculturality and sociolinguistics along with a variety of creative multilingual communicative language activities. In the context of South Africa, the benefits of multilingual pedagogic approaches have been shown to not only result in deeper learning and widening participation, but also to themes of social justice in a situation where language policies that incorporate a range of African languages for teaching and learning, alongside English, have been written for higher

80

Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research

education, but are not widely nor effectively implemented (Deyi et al., 2007; Madiba, 2010). Lin (2006) also highlights the political elements of language in her analysis of bilingual practices in secondary school science classrooms in Hong Kong. She posits that the linguistic purism seemingly adopted by the authorities, which sees language as monolithic, does not represent the more natural language mixing of Cantonese and English that occurs in everyday communication. Accordingly, she positively evaluates classroom practices that use Cantonese to explain scientific terms in English. Such strategies also occur in university classrooms in the Puerto Rican context (Mazak & Herbas-Donoso, 2015) where the need for understanding key scientific terms in English is addressed but taught alongside or through Spanish in a context where the colonial imposition of English has been contested since its introduction approximately 120 years ago. All the studies reported here support the hypercentral and supercentral languages within their particular constellations (except for the Kyppö et al.’s (2015) study, which also includes central languages). In particular, English, the hypercentral language, is used as the medium of instruction,  the language of course materials or the language of assessment. Typically, the national languages work alongside English. Such hierarchical ideology ignores the actual repertoires of an increasingly diverse student population and continues to support elite multilingualism in higher education (Preece, 2019) and, consequently, constantly adds to the Q-value of the languages higher up the pyramid (de Swaan, 2001). However, it seems that this situation cannot be undone, but only undermined because of the particular role English plays in western decolonisation projects, or in our opinion higher education institutions, that have been subsumed by globalisation creating a situation where on the one hand there are attempts to limit the use of English, while on the other hand English is made essential (Canagarajah, 2005). As a result of such a paradoxical situation, J. Fishman would assert that halting the spread of English is futile and would instead suggest the need for assisting ‘local’ languages (García et al., 2006), or central and peripheral languages, which seems to be a weakness in European higher education. This weakness is recognised by Kaufhold and Wennerberg (2020) in the Swedish context who frame students’ languages that are brought to the university as resources and explore how students use their languages for different learning activities. They fi nd that the students use their languages unofficially as part of the learning process, for example in notetaking and mediating instructions, and they call for multilingual resources to be brought to the fore as a way to widen participation among students from migrant backgrounds. If such language-fluid activities are brought to the fore, there is a potential to decentre language away from the hypercentral languages in which students engage in their university studies. This could, in turn, leave some legitimate space for other languages.

Glimpses Into the ‘Language Galaxy’ of International Universities

81

The room for language fluid activities on university courses is limited by the presence of English as an academic lingua franca which, in non-Anglophone countries, is used alongside the national languages. International students typically pass a rather general English profi ciency test to enter a foreign university but can often still be in the process of developing their academic language skills to meet the demands of their English-medium programmes, which are a type of submersion education. Submersion education has been widely condemned at earlier levels of education (Piller, 2016), because it presents the dual challenge of developing content knowledge and language where language skills frequently lag behind development of knowledge (Piller, 2016). In non-anglophone countries, this may also be the case for home students who may consequently avoid courses that require advanced skills in English (e.g. Helsingin Sanomat, 2019), or another foreign language. Considering the constraints, translanguaging or language fluid activities in the seminar room can only be a part of language and epistemological decentring in higher education, but they nevertheless still have the potential to chip away at the current hegemony. In the following section, we will outline the methodology used to explore these issues at a university in Finland. 4 Methodology

The focus group data that support this chapter were collected as part of a project to explore language-policy related themes at university from the international student perspective (Clarke, 2020). Eleven international master’s students (see Table 4.1) agreed to participate in the focus group discussions. The students had been on one of the academic writing courses for master’s students taught by one of the authors, Darling, and were subsequently recruited by her via email invitation. We note that the students had some basic command of the Finnish language, which was not strong enough to support interaction within the university but sufficient for basic service interaction outside the campus. The students thus mostly used English as a global academic lingua franca on campus. The focus group discussions, which took place on campus, were conducted in English within an 80–90 minute time frame. The interview was conducted by Darling who, following the procedural guidelines proposed by Vaughn et al. (1996), planned the interview format and physical arrangements with herself seated outside of the group to create some distance between the students and herself. This was an especially important detail given that she had previously been their teacher. It is important to note, however, that Darling had to intervene during the discussions on occasion in order to keep the discussions on track. An audio and visual-audio

82

Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research

Table 4.1 Focus group participants, by group, gender, age, department or faculty and languages spoken Participant and gender

Age range

Department/Faculty

Languages other than English

FG1 (M) Student A

23–37 years

Agriculture and Forestry

French, Spanish

FG1 (M) Student B

Biological and Environmental Sciences

Cantonese, Mandarin

FG1 (F) Student C

Biological and Environmental Sciences

Hindi

FG1 (F) Student D

Biological and Environmental Sciences

Turkish

Computer Science

Mandarin

FG2 (F) Student F

Biological and Environmental Sciences

Hindi, Marathi

FG2 (F) Student G

Biological and Environmental Sciences

Croatian, Serbian, Slovenian

Biological and Environmental Sciences

Greek

FG3 (F) Student J

Biological and Environmental Sciences

Spanish

FG3 (M) Student K

Biological and Environmental Sciences

Mandarin

FG3 (M) Student L

Computer Science

Vietnamese

FG2 (M) Student E

FG3 (F) Student H

22–24 years

24–29 years

recording was taken of the interview so that it could be transcribed and non-verbal communication observed. Participants gave written informed consent. The group discussions began with an overview of the topic and the establishing of ground rules for the discussion. This was followed by a ‘warm-up’ question concerning their general experience of studying at the university and two transition questions in relation to their use of languages inside and outside education: (1) Think about your everyday life here and share the different ways you typically use your languages. (2) Share the ways in which you use your languages for study purposes. These were followed by a key question concerning their knowledge of the UH language policy: (3) Discuss what you know about the university’s language policy, and a task that used most of the time slot and which focused on their experiences of using language at university vis à vis the university language

Glimpses Into the ‘Language Galaxy’ of International Universities

83

policy. They were given sticky notes with some statements from the language policy written on them and they were asked to: (4) Negotiate together and justify where these statements [on the sticky notes], that are derived from the policy, should go on this scale [from totally agree to completely disagree] on this poster (see Clarke, 2020 for further detail on the task). The statements broadly concerned the official bilingualism of the university, the students’ multilingual skills and the involvement of interculturality and English as an academic lingua franca in teaching and learning situations. Once they had completed the task, they were invited to add personal reflections or conclusions on the interview themes: (5) Looking at the completed poster, how well do you think the language policy meets the needs of the international study body? (6) Share your thoughts on and ideas about this topic. The analytical process started with a close reading of the transcriptions and aspects of theories of enunciation were used to examine the students’ discourses (see e.g. Matusov et al., 2019). By combing through the discussions using linguistic elements such as represented discourses (i.e. using the voice of others to support a claim) and subjectively marked terms (such as adjectives and verbs, see Johansson & Suomela-Salmi, 2011), we identified specificities and similarities in the students’ attitudes towards and opinions and experiences of language use. Subsequent readings were also used to apply codes that interpret the participants’ views and experiences in light of the intermingled discourses of the language fluidity, translanguaging, bilingualism and other related concepts. 5 Analysis

The analysis is composed of two main sections: hints of institutional engagement with multilingualism; and incidental and anecdotal use of translanguaging. The data have been transcribed verbatim and transcription notation (see Appendix 4.1) has been used to provide clarity of meaning. 5.1 Hints of institutional engagement with multilingualism

In this fi rst subsection, we comb through instances of multilingual initiatives from the perspective of the institution, as presented by the participants. Multilingualism here is seen as the mere use and labelling of languages as broad linguistic entities (i.e. a patchwork of different languages from de Swaan’s (2001) language galaxy).

84

Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research

5.1.1 Omnipresence of English and interculturality

The first and perhaps most obvious hint at promoting multilingual use is that of the hypercentral language, English (de Swaan, 2001). As asserted earlier, none of the participants label themselves as native speakers of the language although some use it back home as a lingua franca, e.g. cases of the students from India and Singapore. Without any surprise, for the students, English is presented as the omnipresent and necessary tool of communication during seminars and lectures. In Excerpt 1 the students discuss the role of English in lectures involving Finnish students: Excerpt 1 – FG3 Student H:

Student J: Student K:

Student H: (…) Student K:

oh okay well erm (1.5) [turning to Student J] we in the same group people work in that group :and most of the times (well umso that I would< also participate in my in the *discussion about my thesis* hah (Student K: hmm) (3.0) (…) what about you you said basically the same thing (Student H: hmm) and also our group meetings in English or parts I mean everybody and the professor’s other ss- master’s thesis student have this group meeting and he’s also in that in English so the professor will also give advice for you work something like that (1.0) so I agree that also but in this group that we are now there are plenty of international students (Student J: hmm) so we also speak English >yeah< even in our group there ar- there are more Finnish students than international students but :they still use English instead of Finnish or

In their negotiations, the students individualise the use of multilingualism through English referring to specific professors’ practices. Although Student G seems to suggest that the Finnish students use Finnish to ask questions (to the professor?) when she herself takes the floor to present her research during seminars, the other students explain that English is used by all, even if the class is composed mostly of Finnish students. During these seminars, each student is meant to present their work in turn and get feedback from both professors and classmates. The (accepted) use of hypercentral English seems to occur when someone who does not use Finnish takes the floor. The students do not seem to hint at any resistance to the use of the lingua franca in such situations. It is important to note that the participants seem to hint at the fact that when a Finnish-speaking

Glimpses Into the ‘Language Galaxy’ of International Universities

85

student makes a presentation, Finnish is then used, even if the international students do not necessarily understand it – thus excluding them from discussions. We also note that English is not used consistently with/for international students at the university, although it can serve as a way of bridging potential gaps. In the three focus groups, the students refer to an ‘underground’ practice of multilingualism through English: the use of book exams in English to substitute courses offered exclusively in Finnish. In such exams, the students are given a book to read in English independently and to take an exam based on the book. This study practice, although beneficial to the students since they can obtain credits like their Finnish peers, is, however, criticised by many participants as tedious and creating exclusion from the lecture hall. As the main academic and social lingua franca, the use of English could contribute to developing intercultural awareness, competence and relations (Holmes & Dervin, 2016). During the focus group task, the participants were required to comment on the potential intercultural benefits of using English as a lingua franca with others, especially in relation to their studies. However, very few of the participants seem able to relate the use of English to intercultural aspects. In fact, they seem to struggle with what interculturality is about. Students F and G might represent exceptions in what follows: Excerpt 2 – FG2 Student G:

Student F:

I mean everything is accessible in English (Student F: yeah yeah) (Student E: hm hm?) that’s true I believe that teaching in English at the university supports the presence of different values worldviews and argumentation traditions it does (4.0) :hmm yes yes (>3.0) at least I’ve noticed in the seminars and debates (Student G: yeah) that that it does (Student G: :um) you get to see different sides (1.0) English and people who use it (3.0)

The two students are, respectively, active speakers of Croatian, Slovenian and Serbian (Student G) and of Marathi and Hindi (Student F), coming from superdiverse contexts. For these students the use of multilingualism through English is seen as something positive, which allows engaging with plural thinking; Student G agrees with the statement from the UH language policy that using English allows the expression of ‘different values, worldviews and argumentation traditions’. These elements seem to represent for them what interculturality could be about: challenging the role of dominant languages in creating homogenised knowledge (see García, 2009). Student F adds to this with a general observation relating to in-class discussions. We note, however, that no concrete examples of such plural thinking and decentring practices through the use of English is provided in the discussions and thus remain at a broad level.

86

Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research

Student E, who is part of the same focus group, fails to see the intercultural components behind using English with the people he meets, especially in academic contexts: Excerpt 3 – FG2 Student E:

yeah I don’t know but er like I I have a supervisor and I kind of constantly talk to him (Student F: hmm) and but I (.) so we communicate in English but I don’t think there is too much stuff er intercultural involved in our conversation (1.0) :so what what yeah I don’t know (1.0) we it’s just based on our project for example so there is actually not much cultural stuff involved

For the participant, intercultural communication in English with, for example, his supervisor takes place ‘without culture’ (‘there is actually not much cultural stuff involved’). What seems to matter before all is science (‘our project’), which seems to create smooth interactions. By making this argument, the student is in line with the critical and reflexive branch of the broad field of intercultural communication education, which calls for ‘interculturality beyond culture’, focusing on what links people rather than separates them interculturally (e.g. Holliday, 2010). However what Student E seems to disregard is the potentially westernised, hegemonic and colonising content of discussions around science in the English language (Phipps, 2019). As intercultural phenomena may lead to potential epistemic injustice, scientific discussions should be considered through the lens of critical and reflexive interculturality (Chemla & Fox Keller, 2017). It is difficult to explain why the aforementioned three students seem to differ in the way they see the potential links between language use and interculturality, and even how they conceptualise it. Their life experiences, the context they are from, but also the multitude of languages that they speak and their fields of study (Student E: Computer sciences; Students 2 and 3: Biological and Environmental Sciences) could have a major influence on their views. Although English might appear omnipresent in an international university, its use is neither systematic nor regulated for the benefits of international students – and others. At times, it can serve indirectly as a way of creating exclusion while giving the illusion of inclusion (example of the textbook exams). The apparent minimal reflection around the influence of the use of the lingua franca for interculturality, especially in terms of knowledge production and/or acquisition also tells us that the presence of multilingualism through English does not necessarily make any epistemic difference. 5.1.2 Access to multilingualism? Formal and informal language learning and teaching

While discussing language use and providing potential examples of multilingual and translanguaging practices during their stay abroad, the participants focus both on formal and informal access to multilingualism at the host university. Many of the students discuss language learning and

Glimpses Into the ‘Language Galaxy’ of International Universities

87

teaching at the language centre, where multilingualism appears somewhat ‘legitimised’. Student A describes these opportunities at the language centre: Excerpt 4 – FG1 Student A: well like they actually have a lot of languages :er they have er even like Far:si Kore:an Chi:nese [Student B nods] I mean I :alI mean because I like :er languages a lot I have (.) :been like looking for courses and like there’s like every semester like around like for example twenty courses in K- Korean twenty in Chinese twenty in Spanish and sometime they teach politics or science in Spanish like for people that just want to learn the language

As such, Students K and H claim to have studied respectively French and Swedish (the other official language of Finland), the teaching of which they evaluate positively. Some students also note that their own first languages are either present or absent from the language offering at the university, reflecting some kind of linguistic hierarchy. Student H repeats on two occasions during the focus group that she has not ‘seen’ her language, Greek, ‘anywhere’. By so doing she shows that, in her case, subtractivebilingualism, dominates at the university (Preece, 2019). On the other hand, Student E, who speaks Chinese, realises that one can study his language at the university, especially through the local Confucius Institute: Excerpt 5 – FG 3 Student E:

maybe (I don’t know< how but when you (.1) meet someone from the same country you automatically switch in your language (Student G: hm, Student E: that’s true) and you just you (.1) i- you communicate with them and >that way< may be it’s easier: or er: I don’t know may be you want to talk you know some gossip about someone and no o- *you don’t want other people to hear about (Student G: oh, Student E: hah) it so:* hah:: so you switch the language* hah .hh so: I think um during the whole week I (.) use these two languages [Hindi and English] the most (.2) yeah:

This example aligns with Li’s (2011: 1233) ‘moment analysis’ of Chinese multilingual youths in the UK where translanguaging spaces are formed through the creative, critical, flexible and strategic uses of languages. Moment Analysis focuses on spontaneous language use of individuals and how their cognitive processes lead to the use of their linguistics repertoires for creative and critical purposes (Li Wei, 2011). Most of the students in this study describe their living arrangements as being mixed by nationality with English as the only common language, which may explain why decentring language practices in the social context appear to be so rare. 5.2.1 Educational use of translanguaging

Eight of the students discuss the importance of multilingualism for their studies. However, only two of these students describe techniques used by the institution to include different languages. Student A argues that such practices depend on the professor and field of study and research. As such he mentions the concrete example of writing in one’s own language in a reflexive diary: Excerpt 10 – FG 1 Student A: it’s it’s kind of tricky because I think they do :want :you like to because they have like sometimes this like oh like write something in your own language? like for journal or something like that and they encourage that but I think it’s in specific cases like (…)

The student goes on to point out that he would expect there to be more opportunities for using a greater mix of languages in other faculties where different languages seem more important, perhaps reflecting on his own

Glimpses Into the ‘Language Galaxy’ of International Universities

91

position in the Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry where such opportunities are limited, at least in the context of classroom instruction. The lack of a specific example contributes to a somewhat fuzzy image of pedagogical inclusion of translanguaging. Student G, while reflecting on whether she thinks the university sees multilingualism as a strength, provides a concrete example of pedagogical translanguaging, which consists of editing a Wikipedia entry in a language of her choosing: Excerpt 11 – FG 2 Student G:

well (.) I can think of only one thing I had a seminar, (