Worldly Orientations to Internationalising Education: Non-Western Languages, Theoretic-linguistic Tools and Modes of Critique

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue of Education Sciences will focus on innovative research directed at (a) institutionalising worldly orientations to internationalising education specifically through the activation, mobilisation and deployment of non-Western languages, theoretic-linguistic tools and modes of critique within (b) Anglophone Western universities which privilege and market English-only pedagogies and North Atlantic theories.

Research reporting on theoretic-pedagogical frameworks exploring the institutionalisation of worldly orientations to internationalising education in terms of the following theme are especially welcome:

1. multilingualism, double knowing and contributing the local/global stocks of knowledge;
2. deepening multilingual students capabilities for translanguaging versus monolingual English-only pedagogies;
3. non-Western Higher Degree Researchers’ agency in institutionalising a worldly orientation to (internationalising) education;
4. institutionalising post-monolingual teaching/learning given the commodification of English-only pedagogies;
5. establishing credible grounds for non-Western theoretic-linguistic resources in the face of the commodification of North Atlantic theories;
6. non-Western modes of critique and deficit constructions of non-Western students as uncritical;
7. institutionalising METALS: maths, engineering, technology, art, languages, science;
8. lessons from non-Western students’ lives and histories for institutionalising a worldly orientation to (internationalising) education;
9. lessons from histories of transcultural knowledge exchange for institutionalising a worldly orientation to (internationalising) education;
10. pedagogies of intellectual equality: verifying the presupposition of intellectual equality;
11. pedagogies of intercultural divergence: Exploring the unthought through multilingual concepts;
12. university accreditation of students’ multilingual capabilities;
13. academic freedom and the struggle against nice white racism;
14. non-Western Higher Degree Researchers (HDRs) choosing Anglophone Western academic doctoral educators;
15. innovation, crossing intellectual borders, historical-social-cultural re-formation of disciplinary knowledge;
16. innovation, crossing intellectual borders, and teaching/learning within/against disciplinary formations;
17. refining local/global understandings and practices having contingent historical-social-cultural bases;
18. Indigenous, and non-Western migrant and refugee HDRs’ stance and contributions to worldly orientations to internationalising education;
19. Ethno-linguistic diversity, creativity and knowledge production

This Special Issue of Education Sciences arises out of a longitudinal research program, known as the “Research Oriented School/industry Engaged Teacher-researcher Education (ROSETE) Program in Multilingual Intercultural Education and Work.” In the ROSETE Program, HDR research education becomes the work of theoretical knowledge co-production oriented towards disciplinary change in the field of field inquiry, “a stimulant and an opportunity for professional learning” (Tran and Nguyen, 2015: 965-966). For Tange and Kastberg (2013: 4) this ‘double knowing’ (Singh and Shrestha, 2008) is an educational means for enhancing non-Western HDRs success as learners, in so far as it establishes

relations between the new information that students encounter at their host university and the insight they have obtained previously in other educational settings. In this manner, one can transform students’ indigenous knowledge from a possible barrier to the transmission of Eurocentric wisdom into alternative insights that can be identified and harvested in the classroom. Such inclusiveness works to the benefit of individual learners, who are no longer requested to marginalise earlier acquired theoretical and methodological knowledge when they arrive at a new university.

The ROSETE Program has been conducted for more than a decade at Western Sydney University where:

some PhD supervisors do such things as encourage students to engage with post-colonial theory, with debates about the geopolitics of globalization and the implications for knowledge production, circulation and consumption, and with the research and theorizing of scholars from their home country and region. And, of course, some research students are particularly agential and seek to resist the intellectual practices we have referred to [as English-only and Western-centric]” (Zhang, Chan and Kenway, 2015: 2).

Importantly, as Tran and Nguyen (2015: 965-966) report that “mutual learning occurs at the intersection of knowledge co-construction – the ‘intellectual equality’ zone.” The focus of the ROSETE Program is the innovative enactment and investigation of a worldly orientation to internationalising education through having non-Western Higher Degree Researchers (HDRs) activate, mobilise and deploy non-Western languages, theoretic-linguistic tools and modes of critique in Anglophone Western universities:

the University of Western Sydney 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 (Zhang, Chan and Kenway, 2015: 9).

Speaking of the ROSETE Program, Takayama (2014: 8) notes that

recent educational scholarship in Australia 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—as opposed to empirical—others with whom to challenge the ‘epistemic ignorance’ of the West.

Despite rhetoric claiming the internationalisation of Anglophone Western-centric universities, academics “continue to report the same kinds of difficulties and ‘pedagogical uncertainties’ with teaching international students that were reported over a decade ago” (Ryan, 2011: 637). Likewise, non-Western international students 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” (Ryan, 2011: 639). What are the challenges to worldly orientations to internationalising education posed by:         

1. Anglophone Western-centric universities
2. Bourdieuan inequalities
3. etc.

Choy, Li and Singh (2015: 173) recognise “that 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 (Ryan, 2011: 644).

Prof. Dr. Michael Singh
Guest Editor

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