Multilingual Researchers Internationalizing Monolingual English-Only Education through Post-Monolingual Research Methodologies

Abstract

The argument advanced in this Special Issue of Education Sciences favors democratizing knowledge production and dissemination across the humanities and social sciences through the mainstreaming of multilingual researchers capabilities for theorizing using their full linguistic repertoire. An important contribution of the papers in this Special Issue is the promise that post-monolingual research methodology holds for collaborative projects among multilingual and monolingual researchers that tap into intercultural divergences across languages. Together these papers give warrant to multilingual researchers, including Higher Degree Researchers develop their capabilities for theorizing using their full linguistic repertoire, an educational innovation that could be of immense benefit to scholars working predominantly monolingual universities. Through their thought provoking papers presented in this Special Issue, these researchers invites those working in the education sciences to seriously consider the potential benefits of multiplying the intellectual resources used for theorizing that is possible through activating, mobilizing and deploying researchers’ multilingual resources in knowledge production and dissemination.

This Special Issue of Education Sciences focuses on ground-breaking research in the field of languages, higher education and research directed by developing and testing post-monolingual research methodology [1]. For researchers, including Higher Degree Researchers (HDRs) who speak two or more languages this collection of evidence-driven, theoretically informed papers introduces post-monolingual research methodology. Moreover, post-monolingual research methodology provides a ground-breaking theoretic-pedagogical framework for HDRs and their research educators. Multilingual researchers and HDRs, along with English-speaking monolingual researchers, can make develop their capabilities for theorizing by using their full linguistic repertoire, while explicitly dealing with the tensions created by English-only monolingual theory, research and education. In other words, in this Special Issue multilingual researchers explore the rationale and possibilities for making original contributions to knowledge through using concepts, metaphors, images and modes of critical thinking from diverse languages while grappling with the rigidities associated with the demands that they just use English and theories available in English. Together these research papers are contributing to efforts to institutionalize worldly orientations to internationalizing education through the activation, mobilization and deployment of multiple languages, theoretic-linguistic tools and modes of critique within universities which privilege English-only monolingualism, including theories produced in English.

This Special Issue of Education Sciences arises out of an Australian Research Council investigation into international student mobility and educational innovation which morphed into a longitudinal, multi-cohort program of research [2,3,4]. This longitudinal study was designed to work with HDRs who spoke two or more languages to generate evidence which could test the support or otherwise for the post-monolingual education, theorizing and research methodology. The papers presented in this Special Issue indicates outcomes to date of this research with respect to identifying: (a) the potential of post-monolingual intercultural education across this time with changing cohorts of HDRs; and (b) the changes that post-monolingual pedagogies produced in the HDRs’ capabilities and willingness to develop their capabilities for theorizing using their full linguistic repertoire. Busch [5] prefers the concept Spracherleben to designate their complex lived experience of languages.

The rhetoric of English-only monolingual universities claims to be internationalizing education. Despite this academics “continue to report the same kinds of difficulties and ‘pedagogical uncertainties’ with teaching international students that were reported over a decade ago” [6] (p. 637). Likewise, international students, most of whom come from continental Asia and speak many diverse languages, continue “to report dissatisfaction with aspects of teaching and learning … and [still] lecturers teaching them continue to complain about the skills that international students lack” [6] (p. 639). In speaking of this research program, Takayama [7] (p. 8) notes that it rejects the conventional view of non-Western regions of the world as “simply producers of data for the theory mills of the North” and instead conceptualizes them as epistemic agents capable of theorizing—and challenging the “epistemic ignorance” of the West. It is in this context that Zhang, Chan and Kenway [8] (p. 9) observe that the Western Sydney University:

project is directed towards the development of ‘Australia–Asia modes of theorising’…they explore how diverse, non-Western thought can advance ‘anglophone, Euro-American education’ and its internationalization.

Through post-monolingual research methodology, HDR research education becomes the work of theoretical knowledge co-production oriented towards disciplinary change in the field of inquiry, “a stimulant and an opportunity for professional learning” [9] (pp. 965–966). Importantly, as Tran and Nguyen [9] (pp. 965–966) report that post-monolingual research methodology promotes “mutual learning [which] occurs at the intersection of knowledge co-construction—the ‘intellectual equality’ zone.” In doing so it contributes to the scholarly debates about the geopolitics of neoliberal globalization policies and the possibilities international student mobility presents for knowledge co-production and dissemination. At Western Sydney University some research educators, all too few in fact, develop HDRs’ understanding of post-monolingual research methodology through developing their knowledge of

• Post-monolingual capabilities for theorizing;
• deliberative translanguaging practices;
• history of inter-language knowledge exchange;
• pedagogies of intellectual/racial equality [10].

A key aim of post-monolingual research methodologies is to verify the presupposition that HDRs can develop their theorizing capabilities through using linguistic resources from their life trajectories. Those who have done so in this Special Issue have worked to:

• generate analytical concepts to make meaning of data; to categorize evidence using typologies; to use images to elaborate nuanced propositions, to question existing ways of labelling knowledge claims, and to demystify theorizing;
• interrogate the conditions under which these concepts, metaphors, images and modes of critical thinking might be useful and relevant to sociolinguistic contexts beyond those where they were produced;
• investigate the significance of multilingualism in making original contributions to theorizing by exploring how the theoretical resources they produce might gain a reasonably wide degree of authority or legitimacy;
• explore the conceptual divergences that arise from related ideas within/between languages to produce theoretical tools in the act of self-reflexively exploring their own capabilities for theorizing;
• identify the sense and sensibilities associated with English-only monolingual theory, pedagogies and policies, including any tensions these create by way of academic dependency and sites for making strategic changes in their field of inquiry.

Deliberative translanguaging practices calls forth HDRs’ capabilities for multitasking across their full linguistic repertoire—concepts, metaphors, images and modes of critical thinking—in order to generate theoretic-linguistic tools with which to make sense of the evidence they generate through their investigations. As a deliberative practice of meaning-making or theorizing, translanguaging is used by HDRs in-between conventional theorizing practices in English.

The history of inter-language exchange of scientific knowledge provides further warrant for investigating the possibilities of post-monolingual research methodologies. The mobility of theoretical ideas across time and space saw them transformed by this movement, as well as them in turn transforming the context into which they moved. A challenge for interested HDRs today is contribute to similar movements of knowledge through intellectual cultures by engaging in theorizing using their full linguistic repertoire, given that they are integral to the increasing array of translanguaging networks.

Pedagogies of intellectual/racial equality add to the rationale for post-monolingual research methodologies. A conventional orientation to education foregrounds equity as an intellectual challenge of building the linguistic repertoires of students of non-English speaking backgrounds, appealing for a fair go and thus making equality a goal that is deferred into the distant future, and reinforcing the expectation that equality cannot be achieved. They are positioned by an English-only monolingual mindset, and are expected to position themselves in an assimilationist relationship with this stance. Within this mindset their languages and the knowledge to which it provides access are dismissed as linguistic baggage. Any feelings or sensations they have which might lead them to question this are rendered as interference in their education.

In contrast, pedagogies of intellectual/racial equality entail working with interested HDRs to verify the presupposition that, intellectually they are equally capable of theorizing using the multilayered linguistic repertoire as are monolingual HDRs who only use English. Their linguistic repertoire is formed and deployed through intersecting processes located on the border between monolingualism and multilingualism, and not simply an individual possession per se. The point is that HDRs who have the will and desire to do so, take the chance to see what they can do, say and be by with the working the presuppositions (a) that they speak multiple languages (and do not just emit noise) and (b) that by using their full linguistic and communicative repertoire they can demonstrate (to themselves in the first instance) that they are intelligent, reasoning and reasonable beings capable of theorizing.

As Choy, Li and Singh [11] (p. 173) argue, the “marginalization of non-Western theories in doctoral study constraints efforts to investigate any global dynamics of knowledge flows.” Thus, the warrant “for new knowledge paradigms and mindsets” for internationalising education [6] (p. 644). The papers presented in this Special Issue provide evidence of researchers and Higher Degree Researchers whose intellectual agency seeks to resist the hegemonic practices of monolingual English-only means of instruction, research and theorizing. Together they demonstrate a range of educational means for enhancing HDRs success as learners and researchers through establishing productive intellectual relations between the new knowledge that they encounter in English-only monolingual universities and the concepts, metaphors, images and modes of critical thinking they can access through their various linguistic resources, some of which they obtained previously in another intellectual culture. In this manner, they can transform their linguistic dialogues and the theoretical tools it provides access to from a deficiency which presents a barrier to the transmission of English-only monolingual wisdom into intellectual resources for deepening their own capabilities and extending the possibilities for internationalizing education. At the very least, post-monolingual research methodologies works to the benefit of individual HDRs and researchers, who are no longer required to marginalize their multidimensional linguistic repertoire and their prior learning when they arrive at an English-only monolingual university even though they position themselves in relation to that the constricting or exclusionary power of that socio-linguistic environment.