Transnational postgraduate students’ experience of voice and participation

Kathrin Kaufhold

doi:10.1515/applirev-2019-0143

Abstract

Abstract The article examines transnational students’ experiences of participation in European higher education by applying the notion of voice that encompasses the capacity to communicate and to be heard (Hymes 1996. Ethnography, linguistics, narrative inequality: Toward an understanding of voice. London: Taylor & Francis). Relating voice to access and participation, the article moves forward debates around incorporating students’ multilingual knowledge resources in diverse writing practices in academia. It takes into account structural and ideological conditions as well as the creative potential of translanguaging in students’ knowledge production. The instrumental case study explores the lived experiences of three multilingual students with highly diverse linguistic and educational backgrounds, who are enrolled in humanities master’s programmes at a Swedish university. It investigates the students’ perceptions of how they can make use of their linguistic and educational repertoires. The data derive from interviews around texts and audio-recorded writing diaries. The results demonstrate how translanguaging is mainly connected to writing for personal use and limited or regulated in assignment writing. They reveal multiple and contrasting ideological views on language use and knowledge, and highlight possibilities and obstacles for appropriating and recontextualising knowledge across languages, educational contexts and disciplines. The article thus connects translanguaging to questions of participation and access more broadly.

Highlights

European universities experience an increasing diversification partly due to internationalisation and migration processes especially at the postgraduate level.This work is licensed Kathrin KaufholdSome students belong to a “new global elite” (Vandrick 2011) of highly mobile, well-resourced students with experiences of living and studying in a range of countries, while others have less privileged but mobile trajectories
The instrumental case study explores the lived experiences of three multilingual students with highly diverse linguistic and educational backgrounds, who are enrolled in humanities master’s programmes at a Swedish university
The results demonstrate how translanguaging is mainly connected to writing for personal use and limited or regulated in assignment writing

Summary

Introduction

Some students belong to a “new global elite” (Vandrick 2011) of highly mobile, well-resourced students with experiences of living and studying in a range of countries, while others have less privileged but mobile trajectories. Both groups can be characterised as transnational, meaning that they have mutual ties to family and other relations in a range of countries often using several languages (see Block 2017). A process of knowledge construction that goes beyond language(s)” This concept of translanguaging goes beyond a focus on systems and speakers and describes a “linguistics of participation” (Rampton quoted in Li Wei 2018: 15)

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