Centring international student voice: a collaborative autoethnography and critical reflections from an equity-focused doctoral course
摘要
A promising pedagogical practice that faculty utilises to enhance equity and inclusion is the centring of marginalised student voice in curricular design. The implementation of these approaches in university classrooms, however, does not always include the voices of international students, who are often expected to assimilate into US institutions of higher education. In this paper, an international doctoral student utilises collaborative autoethnographic methods (CAE) with one of the instructors of a mandatory introductory education research course that she was enrolled in, to analyse the engagement of student voice in this equity-focused course. We anchor our analysis in a social justice-oriented approach to student voice, integrating critical reflection methods to develop our collaborative autoethnographic findings into suggestions to improve practice. By sharing our stories with each other and engaging in a collective exploration of our experiences, we found that the course engaged different student voice strategies to create an equitable learning environment. However, the positionalities of the instructors and the context of the course and education programme shaped which dimensions of equity these student voice strategies focused on, leading to international students being overlooked. As international enrolment continues to rise, this study has insightful practice-based implications for stakeholders who seek to create equitable and transformative environments for marginalised students in higher education.