Students as Multilingual Influencers: Towards Linguistically Diverse Higher Education in Anglophone Contexts

This chapter draws on a recent ‘students as partners’ project with four multilingual undergraduate students as co-researchers. It aimed to explore how university students from a range of disciplines engage with everyday lived linguistic and cultural diversity in their educational and social communities. The project was conducted at a multi-campus university in Victoria, Australia, and engaged peer-facilitated focus groups with academic staff and students. Current research in this area has focused on academic staff and their teaching, and discourse analytic work on university policy documents. However, the perspectives of multilingual university students as grassroots policy actors remain under-represented and warrant further exploration, as students engage with and have direct experience of the complexities and impact of linguistically inclusive pedagogy, policy and practice in English-dominant universities. Our project sought to address this gap by foregrounding student voice to generate new insights into how multilingual students engage with linguistic diversity in their educational and social contexts, and to identify the discourses that underpin the complexities of, and tensions and power imbalances between, English-dominant institutional framing and students’ multilingual realities. The chapter concludes with student-initiated suggestions as to how diversity of languages, cultures and knowledges could be pedagogically mobilised for the benefit of all learners.