Reimagining Conversations

Dr Victoria Odeniyi is a Research Fellow at the Decolonising Arts Institute.

The ‘Reimagining Conversations with Multilingual Students’ research project was developed to examine interaction with international students to raise awareness of the educational potential of the use of language.

• Read the full report on Reimagining Conversations (PDF 2MB)
• If you’d like to find out more about this study, please get in touch with Dr Victoria Odeniyi.

The report outlines 6 key recommendations for higher education:

• The multilingual backgrounds of students and tutors should be seen as a pedagogic resource and as a legitimate part of classroom and creative practice.
• One way of navigating existing communication imbalances would be to recruit tutors whose language backgrounds are more closely aligned with the multilingual backgrounds of the students they teach.
• Facilitating class talk online is time consuming and can demand new teaching and communication practices. Tutors can be supported more in developing active student participation in the curriculum and in classroom activities in this regard.
• Systematic cross-institutional work engaging a broad range of staff would help to raise awareness and to develop greater understanding of the complex and dynamic needs of linguistically and culturally diverse international students with their distinct knowledge.
• Develop an in-house survey equivalent to the NSS, constructed specifically with the experiences of all postgraduate and undergraduate students with international fee status in mind.
• If conversations are to be reimagined to allow more contributions to be recognised and diverse voices heard, changes are needed to promote greater linguistic, epistemic, and culturally (more) open inclusion. In return, changes in practices informed by the project findings should benefit all students.