The work of Digital Humanities has evolved into an interdisciplinary exploration of media, technology and culture. In the Department of Digital Humanities (DDH) at King’s College London, faculty hail from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, including Cultural Studies, Library and Information Sciences, Computer Science, Informatics, Anthropology, and Sociology. The interdisciplinary makeup of DDH creates a unique space for developing pedagogy and curriculum that links technical practices with theory-based critiques of culture and society. Adding to this unique space is the global and multicultural composition of taught postgraduate (MA and MSc) students. Within our more global context, it is becoming crucial for departments like DDH to find effective ways to make meaning across various languages, cultures, and educational backgrounds. One particularly effective approach to doing so has been developed by language and education scholars (see especially Canagarajah 2002, 2011, 2013; Lu, 2004; Horner, 2010; Horner, Lu, & Matsuda, 2010; Horner & Tetreault, 2017; Lalicker, 2017) over the past two decades: a pedagogy of translanguaging (to borrow from Canagarajah (2011)). The idea behind this pedagogy is to better include an ever-more global student cohort for deeper learning and research.
But, how can we effectively enact a pedagogy of translanguaging within institutions of higher education in the U.K.? In some ways, this is already happening, whether we are ready for it or not. DDH, is a large department within the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at King’s College London, and its demographics are reflective of wider trends across the College and other Russell Group institutions. This is a clear sign that students, particularly at the postgraduate level, are already multilingual and multinational, including especially, in the past five years, a large proportion of Chinese nationals. Failing to engage with this material reality is simply no longer an option. But, beyond that, how can we provide truly translingual pedagogy and contexts within our classrooms, programs, and institutional frameworks?
To explore these questions, our paper will present a case study based on findings from focus groups conducted over the 2019-2020 academic year with post-graduate students and teaching staff in DDH. Our initial findings indicate that while changes to curriculum and assessment have an overwhelmingly positive impact on student experiences, there are still areas where teaching practices could further benefit from adopting translingual practices. Namely, there is a tension between encouraging practice-based work that allows students to experiment with language and traditional requirements for academic essays that, in spite of mandates and frameworks to decolonize curriculum, still require understanding and mastery of (generally) European narrative and rhetorical traditions. Students and staff alike are confronted with distinct areas of linguistic performance that are often at odds with initiatives to include more diverse forms of media from an international range of perspectives. Since 2020, DDH has established working groups to evaluate assessment for learning and decolonizing curriculum (particularly module reading lists). The former initiative reflects Faculty-wide mandates to reduce graded forms of assessment and increase formative assessments and project work. The latter initiative is considered a key part of inclusive education work that links library services, education, and curriculum planning with student outcomes and success. Nonetheless, there is still a lot of work to be done. We propose the practice of translanguaging as a productive way towards better meeting both institutional-level diversity and inclusion mandates, and the various day-to-day needs of both faculty and students.
The key definition of translanguaging is an expansive one, like the following from Canagarajah (2011):
A neologism, it has come to stand for assumptions such as the following: that, for multilinguals, languages are part of a repertoire that is accessed for their communicative purposes; languages are not discrete and separated, but form an integrated system for them; multilingual competence emerges out of local practices where multiple languages are negotiated for communication; competence doesn’t consist of separate competencies for each language, but a multicompetence that functions symbiotically for the different languages in one’s repertoire; and, for these reasons, proficiency for multilinguals is focused on repertoire building—i.e., developing abilities in the different functions served by different languages—rather than total mastery of each and every language. (p. 1)
Translanguaging, according to this definition, is understanding language to be various, intersecting, and, above all, about how one applies their linguistic knowledges to communicate effectively with the audience of their choice and/or need. Importantly, as Canagarajah (2011) continues, translanguaging ‘is a creative improvisation according to the needs of the context and local situation. It is an interactive achievement that depends on aligning one’s language resources to the features of the ecology to construct meaning’ (p. 5). These views of translanguaging require educators to move away from their ‘multilingualism as deficit’ model, and towards a model of collaborative meaning-making with students and fellow scholars. Finally, Canagarajah (2011) is quick to point out that translanguaging should not be limited to multilingual individuals, because all language users will mesh codes in communication with different audiences and contexts. We argue that a pedagogy of translanguaging is ideal for higher education in multi-disciplinary departments with diverse, international student cohorts precisely because it places faculty and students from wide-ranging national and linguistic origins together in learning spaces, and figuring out how to effectively negotiate these multiple cultural and linguistic approaches to meaning-making can only serve to strengthen research and teaching across U.K. institutions.
DDH has a growing number of international students—particularly students from mainland China. Opportunities to engage with technical infrastructures, cultural heritage systems and media ecologies have evolved with this increase in international students. In tandem with this growth in students from China, is an evolution in curriculum offerings in DDH. The department currently offers post graduate research (PhD) supervision, six different master’s degrees, and a Bachelor of Arts degree. Across these degrees, teaching staff endeavor to balance practical and technical exercises with theoretical analyses of networked technologies in a range of sectors (e.g., cultural heritage, big data, and digital economies). The intersection of practice and theory is an opportunity to challenge students’ engagement with English language materials in a range of media—text, video, audio, and code, to name a few. Simultaneously, students are required to balance collaborative work and essay writing completed on an individual basis. This range of opportunities requires practicing and performing English skills in many different ways, and when managed effectively is an opportunity to not only break down communication barriers, but more importantly, for teachers and students to collaboratively negotiate meaning-making as an expression of learning. At the time of the start of our study in 2019, changes to curriculum and pedagogy in DDH were being made slowly. The transition was difficult, as it introduced tension between traditional approaches to higher education in the United Kingdom, i.e. largely individual-based learning, few assessments based almost entirely in the academic essay, and relatively little formative assessment (i.e. assessments geared towards scaffolding learning over time). Therefore, we sought to understand how students could help us to better transition into new practices that would not only help them to scaffold their learning, but also deepen the meaning-making community in DDH.
At both the university and department level, an increasingly diverse student body, in tandem with the multidisciplinary nature of degrees offered by DDH, led to the creation of elective modules to complement core degree coursework. These modules were designed to present opportunities for global and multicultural discussions about the humanities (generally) and the effects digital technologies have on scholarly practices. In addition, there was much discussion about how to ‘decolonize’ curriculum through peer review of reading lists and initiatives to co-teach modules to diversify perspectives on lecture themes, which have created a more egalitarian and collaborative environment for curriculum development. However, curriculum is not necessarily synonymous with pedagogy, and there remain gaps in the methods and methodologies used to design assessments, evaluate student learning, and recognize contributions to lectures and seminars.
Moreover, simply changing a reading list is not enough to ‘decolonize’ a curriculum that was originally designed to serve students who are largely white, middle class, and British. As Ahmed (2007; 2012) has discussed about her work on diversity and equity in institutions of higher education in the U.K., it can often be the case that the university and/or department will take on terms such as ‘diversity’ or, in this case, ‘decolonizing’, and allow the use of the term itself, in addition to very small actions, to stand in the place of doing actual diversity: ‘To be seen as “being diverse” leads to the failure to commit to “doing diversity”, as the organization says it “is it”, or even that it already “does it”, which means that it sees there is nothing left to do”’ (Ahmed, 2007, p. 244). While it is certainly true that many faculty members within DDH did truly commit themselves to revising lecture content, seminar activities, and expanding reading lists to better connect with the student population we had, as well as to remain more ‘current’ and ‘global’, it is also the case that only adding texts to reading lists, or only adding examples to lectures is not sufficient without making larger structural changes to marking, feedback and grade ratification practices, and, most importantly, how we prepare students (or not) to succeed in assessments.
Moreover, while teachers had the freedom to change their reading lists, they had much less freedom and limited training for how to provide effective scaffolding to prepare students to perform well in their essay assessments. It is furthermore true that entrenched attitudes about traditional study skills can affect instructors’ perceptions of students’ engagement with curriculum, and a prioritization of academic English limits the possibilities for creative, multilingual and remediated or multi-media expressions of learning. In part, these limitations are a reflection of the bureaucratic mechanisms in place to standardize curriculum, and they exist because, unfortunately, too little research on teaching and student experience has reached beyond the discipline of Education. Consequently, there are systemic issues that invariably limit the creative and critical contributions of international and multilingual students in DDH. In our study, then, we wanted to understand what we could recommend to our university to actually do equity and diversity in our classrooms.
To address at least some of these systemic issues, we held interviews with a range of faculty members from Teaching Fellow to full Professor, speaking with a total of four faculty members. In addition, we conducted a series of focus groups with students from four DDH MA programs: including Digital Asset and Media Management (DAMM), Digital Culture and Society (DCS), Digital Humanities (DH), and Big Data and Society (BDS). In total, we had seven participants who spoke to us both in initial and follow-up focus groups. The initial focus group discussions were held in two-hour sessions in person, and students were sent the key questions for discussion ahead of time. The follow-up focus groups were conducted online, due to Covid-19 restrictions that were put in place as of 14 March 2020.
While focus groups only allowed us to speak with a small number of students, our discussions were extremely detailed and personal, showing us far more depth than we might have been able to gather from surveys alone. These sessions made it clear that, while multiple discussions about decolonizing reading lists, diversifying assessments, and scaffolding module syllabi had taken place in department meetings and student-staff liaison committee meetings, these approaches were still in their infancy. Ultimately, students needed more directed instruction in academic reading and writing, and staff needed support to explore and implement inclusive teaching and assessment strategies.
When we spoke of issues relating to pedagogy, students named the following key trends that they would like to see: 1) Making the expectations for assigned writing clearer; 2) providing more consistent feedback; 3) using examples of student writing, but limiting these to good examples; 4) discussing the context of readings and assignments; and, finally, 5) utilizing universal design. These themes were repeated across focus groups, both in their first semester of the MA program, and in the second semester, after students had had some time to fully acclimate to the rhythms of UK higher education and to receive their first graded work. Here, we would like to explore some direct quotations both from these focus groups and from interviews with faculty members in order to demonstrate how these themes were not only requests from individual students, but, in fact, in alignment with a pedagogy of translanguaging.
1. Making the expectations for assigned writing clearer
In 2019 the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at King’s used a shared rubric for judging postgraduate level writing across the Arts and Humanities (see Supplementary Materials). Though this rubric was developed by King’s administration and shared universally, it is not particularly detailed or thorough as it is meant to guide instructors across a wide range of subjects and discourse communities. It is understandable, then, that students would prefer to have a much more specific rubric in mind for the essays they write for their modules in their chosen master’s course. According to research within Academic Literacies by Brian V. Street (2009), the true key to effective rubrics and scaffolding is both to meet students where they are and to be fully explicit about what one’s expectations are for a ‘successful’ assessment. This is especially the case in a system that does not provide writing instruction to its students. The King’s College rubric, on the other hand, is anything but explicit. It is broad, vague, and to a certain degree, inscrutable. While the broad sense of the rubric is, indeed, meant to apply to multiple different departments with vastly different cultures of writing, it is nonetheless the case that faculty within DDH needed to develop a set of rubrics to utilize across their majors in order to both streamline and improve feedback practices.
The students we spoke to were particularly concerned with what the expectations of language use, research, organization, etc. were, and how each element, such as formatting versus documentation versus grammar and punctuation versus organization versus argument and content would be weighted. Often, students were presented with an assignment brief that was very short, with only a few questions that had been cleared with an external examiner mere weeks before the beginning of term, and students were given no information other than the generalized rubric for marking writing. This often left students confused and anxious. Many reported feeling the way the following two participants from the Digital Humanities or DH course felt:
DH Participant 2: For me, I need to make sure that I’m writing the right thing, so I spend a lot of time on outlining a plan. And I discuss that with my personal tutor to make sure that, at least the outline, I mean the logical part, is right. So, to be honest, I got a low score in my core module, but I think a problem could be…my writing is one thing, and the other thing could be the citations or something. But, at least, I think my logical part is there.
DH Participant 1: Yeah, but for this midterm assessment, we didn’t have really very clear instructions or guidelines, because it’s all based on the department guidelines, so we don’t know exactly what we are expected to do. So, I just sort of freestyle wrote whatever I wanted. But, still, I feel ike it’s not very clear, or explicit.
Ultimately, what these comments show us is that students needed a lot more specificity about their module instructor’s expectations for writing style, essay structure, and referencing practices. Participants indicated that specificity established a framework for seeking support from tutors, classmates and writing lab workshops. In many ways then, what might seem redundant or overly specific to instructors enhances students’ confidence in their academic practices and creates more space for building rapport with classmates and instructors. Certainly, an extended rubric can only do a portion of this work, and it’s what students were asking for. But, beyond an expanded and more explicit rubric, students needed time to receive and negotiate the feedback they received from their instructors in less high-risk settings: i.e. through a series of iterative formative assessments, and not simply individual summative assessments.
Interestingly, faculty reflected these concerns in their interviews as well. In general, faculty reported being less concerned with the specific language students were using than with the larger rhetorical approach to essay writing in U.K. academia, especially signposting. Moreover, faculty felt that it was impossible for them to be as explicit as they would like, because they were often asked to mark essays for modules they did not teach and/or in subject areas with which they were unfamiliar. In the former case, one Teaching Fellow, Renee Keene, said:
I just want to see a good structure, especially for an essay—well, and a report, but predominantly I’m marking essays. That is one of the things that’s really really important. And good transitions between paragraphs and sections. I always say to the students, ‘Don’t expect me to understand how that example relates to the previous paragraph’ or ‘Don’t let a quote stand in for a point’ or ‘Always introduce what the next section is going to say and why and for what purpose, and how it relates to what came before it, and how it relates to what will come after it’. Signposting to me is very important. (Renee Keene, Personal Communication, 20 February 2020)
The disconnect, here, appears not to be a complete lack of discussion about academic expectations in the U.K., but rather, not enough time for students to practice these. While it is true that one student refers to a formative assessment, these assessments were only utilized in two courses: the Digital Asset and Media Management MA (DAMM), and the Digital Humanities MA (DH).
Because of the sheer number of students in the DAMM programme, not only were students not really able to receive ongoing feedback, but, more troubling, they were often receiving feedback from faculty members who had neither taught any seminars or lectures on the module and who were unfamiliar with the entire topic area of DAMM. In fact, in Brit’s first two years at King’s College London, they were frequently asked to mark DAMM formative assessments, though they were hired to teach in the Digital Culture and Society BA and MA programmes, for which they had formal training. This meant that while Brit (and as Teaching Fellow Andy Carter points out below) was only able to respond to issues of organization and logic, but was unable to judge that in addition to the student’s grasp of the material and their ability to synthesise across multiple weeks of instruction. Andy Carter says it best when he remarks:
I wish that we would get assigned essays that we were trained to mark. I don’t think I’m trained or an adequate marker of DAMM [Digital Asset and Media Management MA] modules, for example. If they want me to be, then they have to train me on it, because I just feel like I’m working by the numbers on those ones. You know, I can work on those essays stylistically, which is fine, but I feel like I’m not giving them the service they deserve, compared to what I want to do. (Andy Carter, Personal Communication, 24 April 2020)
In addition to this issue, as Andy Carter points out, different academic fields have different cultures of what counts as “good academic writing,” which means marking “stylistic” features can be potentially misleading when one is asked to comment outside of their field. In addition, merely receiving comments on an essay, even a formative one, four weeks after it was written is unlikely to have a helpful impact on future student writing, because these comments can still often remain inscrutable for students unfamiliar with their new area of study, and, certainly, the general expectations of ‘good academic writing’ in their country of study.
One way to address this issue, discussed by Street (2009), as well as Lu (1994; 2004) and Canagarajah (2011), is to engage students in the development and discussion of the ‘hidden’ features of academic writing. Lu (1994) discusses a key activity she engages students in (both in the first year of undergraduate study, as well as in more advanced classes): Lu asks students to read examples of another student’s writing that has what they might on the surface believe to be easily fixable ‘errors’. Lu (1994) then asks students to more deeply consider the ‘error’ as a possible pathway to meaning making, and, therefore, to discuss what change another student might make. Similarly, both Street (2009) and Canagarajah (2011) engage students in in-depth discussion of both academic expectations and so-called ‘errors’. The key to this approach is that it invites student agency, and it deepens both their sense of ownership over their writing, as well as belonging in their chosen field of study. In particular, research by Lea and Street (1998) (as discussed in Street, 2009) found that students’ difficulties in their writing were caused more so by a disconnect between their and their faculty member’s understanding of the roles of student and academic writing more generally, rather than surface-level concerns such as grammar and punctuation. Ultimately, as research in both Academic Literacies and TESOL suggests, then, the best way forward is to engage students into ongoing discussions of their use of language as well as their understanding both of subject material and the typical rhetorical moves of academic writing, so that students can succeed but also change the field for which they are writing.
2) Providing more consistent feedback
As was discussed above, while being more explicit about one’s expectations for student writing is key, it is not enough. It also requires both student engagement in negotiating what ‘good writing’ can be and ongoing feedback. Both students and faculty alike agreed that more feedback was needed to help students better succeed in their assessments. Below is an excerpt from conversations we had with focus group participants about the necessity of feedback. Across the board, students wanted far more feedback and time to respond to that feedback.
Brit: You said earlier that there’s not enough training, the writing lab is really limited at the moment. So, beyond having more one-to-one sessions, what other kinds of things would you like to see made available?
Participant 3: Increased sessions to improve our academic writing. Assign more essays. Right now, we only have two group projects, and not everyone has the opportunity to write academically. Maybe, they will be less comfortable for writing the final essay writing assignment. I think writing training should be more consistent.
Participant 1: Maybe it can be compulsory? We can practice to learn how to write introductions this week, and then we can work on another part, like the methodology next week. Etc.
It’s clear from the above that students not only wanted more immediate feedback, but also more types of feedback, from more informal to more formal, as well as the opportunity to build upon that feedback over time, rather than receiving it weeks after they have turned in what they consider to be the final draft of an assessment for a module, and, often, while they are already beginning the difficult work of learning new material in different modules.
Again, faculty members reflected these same concerns in their own interviews, but they also presented some possible approaches to this lack of feedback for students. As Teaching Fellow Renee Keane stated, ‘Students often feedback that there’s not enough ongoing feedback in their modules, because, on the MA, there’s only one assessment at the end, so we don’t give them any feedback on their writing’ (Personal Communication, 20 February 2020). Another Teaching Fellow, Andy Carter, began using informal presentations in his seminars to help students to practice academic expectations and to provide them with more immediate feedback:
So, what I usually do in the presentations is, they’ll have their presentations in one seminar, and then I’ll have an hour or so afterwards, where I go through each group, and spend about 15 minutes giving my feedback…. When I’m giving feedback, often, I’m talking about the content, obviously, but I’m also giving them feedback on their presentation style, what they are doing, what they’re not doing, what their slides are doing, what they’re not doing. (Andy Carter, Personal Communication, 24 April 2020)
In this case, students are receiving immediate feedback that they can build upon later as they develop plans for their written assessments that they can, again, receive more feedback on in the essay preparation sessions in seminars late in the semester.
Another approach was proposed by Professor Alex Bassett, which would include students in an ongoing discussion of the expectations—in his case, he utilized an open-ended FAQ Google Document for students to utilize: “I also run a Frequently Asked Questions [FAQs] alongside the module. So, I have a Google Document, which anyone with the link can edit into…. So students ask the questions about the assignment. And, there’s an open document for any of the students to see…. So, you then build a conversation that happens through the course in the FAQ” (Alex Bassett, Personal Communication, 11 Nov. 2019). What we see here is not only frequent feedback but student involvement in the development of this feedback. These are two fantastic ways to try to broach providing ongoing feedback to students within the current system. However, Kristen and I would argue that more needs to be done to change the overall structure of modules and assessments to better incorporate students into negotiating what their academic writing can and should look like, and how to accomplish that. We will discuss our specific recommendations for moving forward below, but, for now, it’s important to point out that while faculty members were trying different ways to provide ongoing and key feedback to students, many students still needed more time to fully engage with that feedback than was currently possible in the traditional structure of their modules at King’s.
3) Using examples of student writing, but limiting these to good examples
One key way that students can be invited directly into negotiating meaning, and what counts as a ‘good academic essay’ is to provide students with example essays. In general, research on writing shows that student writers can perform better when they have examples that reflect what their own writing might reasonably look like for the purposes of a class (Bunn, 2013; Bean & Melzer, 2021). The key with using examples, however, is not to merely include them in a reading list, or a list of course materials, but, rather, to fully incorporate the examples into the teaching, so that students are expected to read these examples critically, and to reflect upon what the examples do well, what they could do better, and how they might relate to the projects students are currently building. Without this critical focus, examples can potentially be more confusing, constraining, and even alienating to students.
The students we spoke to seemed overall positive on the use of student examples in their class, so long as: 1) the examples were not from student writing in the same class or semester (unless that writing was discussed within the confines of a writing workshop); and 2) as long as the examples represented what students might do, rather than what they should avoid. For example, one participant from the Digital Asset and Media Management focus group had the following to say about the use of examples in one of her seminars:
P2: I just want to say one thing about the seminars. As for the group exercise, we submitted a short paragraph of writing and, after this submission, we had the seminar. And the seminar leader just displayed one of the writings without erasing the group number. She said the reason she’s displaying it and going through it is that we can learn from others. But, it would have been much better if she posted a good example of writing, instead of a bad example. She just read through it, and pointed out why it is bad. I’m not sure if this writing was from one of the groups in our seminar or not, but, to me, I didn’t get the point of going through a bad example, without erasing the group number.
While the instructor, in this case, was attempting to provide students with timely feedback and to be explicit about her expectations for student writing, two very good goals for a class session, it’s clear from this student’s response that the fact that the teacher used a non-anonymous example, and that the teacher picked an example she felt was ‘bad’ not only left a bad taste in the student’s mouth, but was also a confounding choice. Why not show students how to do something well? Furthermore, we cannot imagine the feelings of the student writers in the group that was deemed to have done the assignment ‘poorly’. It is important to receive feedback, but equally important that critical feedback on how to improve is not done publicly. Moreover, students, themselves, were not asked to engage deeply with the writing they produced, let alone from this one group. So, while students were receiving a direct example of ‘what not to do’, they were not engaged in judging why. Ultimately, it is likely that this particular use of a student example would have caused more anxiety in students, rather than less in the process of preparing their final essays for the module.
However, some students did have good experiences with examples in their classroom, though in this case, the examples were not from student work. The following students from Digital Humanities talked about the use of examples in their web design module:
DH Participant 1: But, with web design, because it’s got ongoing assessment, for each assessment, we have very clear instructions. What we are expected to do, what kind of website we are expected to build, so it doesn’t matter what method you use as long as you get the result, that will be fine.
DH Participant 2: Do you mean the standards?
DH Participant1: Yeah, we have a picture—this is the website we need to build, and then we just code.
DH Participant 2: So you have an example?
DH Participant 1: Yeah, it’s like a graphic instruction.
Here, it’s clear that having good examples provided a more positive feeling among students. Moreover, the instructor used the examples as a way to help students understand how such work takes place in the real world—that it is common for those involved in web design to engage with multiple professionals and experts in order to achieve both the look and function they desire for their website. Because the examples were good and students were asked to consider how the examples were merely one way to achieve effective web design, students neither slavishly followed them, nor saw them as additional sources of anxiety. While students were not seeing other student examples in the module materials, they were consistently workshopping their own design processes with classmates and the instructor, so they were able to be full agents in deciding how they would take inspiration from an example, but nonetheless develop their own project. We would argue that this approach to using examples, including student examples, is one very effective way to engage students deeply in negotiating meaning making, without necessarily adding unfairly to an instructor’s labor hours.
4) Discussing the context of readings and assignments
In addition to explicitness regarding assessment expectations, as well as more consistent and timely feedback, students also explained that they would like more context for the readings they were assigned. They wanted to more fully understand why those readings were assigned, how these readings fit into the overall shape of the module and even the field, as well as how to best understand the historical, cultural, and academic underpinnings of the articles they were reading. Below is a representative conversation we had with students across our focus groups on what they wanted their teachers to know about how students were thinking about the assigned reading.
Participant 1: It is better to know the reason why you choose the reading for us. Because sometimes I can easily get lost in the reading context, and I forget what he was saying five minutes ago.
Kristen: Yeah, do you think that would not only help you to prepare for class, but to have an expectation of what you’re going to discuss and how to engage with your seminar leaders?
Participant1: Yeah. Because then I can get a purpose. Maybe you can just list one sentence.
Participant 3: Why you choose the reading.
Participant 1: Yeah, behind the topic. If you read this, you can know X.
Participant 3: And mention some interesting arguments and conclusions of the literature in the lecture or in the activities. And, if we don’t reflect on what we read in the seminar, then we totally will forget it.
At the time, discussion in faculty meetings was that we should assign less reading, to help students to keep up, because of the language barrier for some students. While studies in Education do emphasize being able to do more with less—i.e. that teachers are better served helping their students to dig deeply into fewer readings, rather than assigning more reading—students told us that it was not necessarily the amount of reading that was the issue, or the complexity of the language (though that was true for many early in the year), but rather the lack of context about the readings that made it challenging for them.
It is true that, from a student’s perspective, readings are presented on a linear list related to certain topics by week, but without any other comment. While teachers certainly had specific ideas in mind about why they had assigned a reading, and how it would help students to understand the topic for the week, they often expected students to make this leap themselves, or only after lectures. While this approach is reasonable in many ways for students already familiar with the system of higher education in the U.K., it was not reasonable for the current student population, the majority of whom completed their Bachelor’s degrees in China, where the very expectations of ‘doing school’ are different. Furthermore, faculty seemed to think that students’ struggling with essay assessments was that they had failed to engage thoroughly with readings and/or course content. We see this perspective reflected by both Teaching Fellow, Andy Carter, and Professor Alex Bassett below.
Andy Carter: So, I think that’s the biggest challenge, as always, of getting them to do the reading, getting them to see the value in the reading, because the reading really makes the essay at the end of the day. It doesn’t matter how good a writer you are, unless you’ve done some of the reading, you can’t synthesise these ideas together and demonstrate your understanding with the literature. So that’s the biggest flaw. (Personal Communication, 24 April 2020)
Alex Bassett: I was thinking that, “You put so much effort into finding the thing that allows you to just answer it without doing the work. If you’d put the effort into doing it, you would have been fine”. So, with the core course, the most disappointing aspect is just genuinely when the essay gives you the impression that they haven’t attended any lectures or seminars. There’s no sense from the work that they’ve actually paid attention. (Personal Communication, 11 November 2019).
While it is potentially true that some students perform poorly on essay assessments either because they have failed to complete the reading (seeing it as unnecessary) or because they were lazy, it is also likely, perhaps even more so, that students struggle with understanding the why, how, and what of the readings, and, therefore, struggled to link them to the topics in both their weekly class sessions and their assessments.
In his work on the ‘hidden features’ of academic writing, Street (2009) discusses how he worked with graduate students to break down academic articles into smaller pieces, paying close attention to things like openings, voice, sense of audience, answering the ‘so what?’ question, conclusions, etc. The key, here, was to help students see the link between how other academic authors engage with their audiences and how students could do this with their own writing. This is one way to help students to learn more deeply about how to approach academic writing within a particular field or fields. But, making sure to provide the full context of the reading is key too, as has been addressed by researchers in Rhetoric and Composition, who have argued that explicitly discussing how reading and writing are connected via sharing the context of a reading is key to an effective pedagogy of writing (see especially Bunn, 2013, and Carillo, 2017).
5) Utilizing universal design
That teachers should take time to be more explicit about why they assign the readings they do, as well as being very clear about the historical, cultural, and academic context of those readings connects nicely to the final finding from our focus groups: teachers should apply principles of universal design so that their materials and assessments are accessible to all students. Participants in our focus groups did not use this terminology, but through deep conversation with students, it became clear that universal design was the best way to address what they felt was lacking in their current course materials. The idea of universal design becomes very clear in the conversation below, which came from our third focus group.
Participant 2: For me, I welcome other kinds of things, like podcasts or videos. But I need subtitles. Like YouTube will automatically show some subtitles, and that is helpful. But, sometimes, it doesn’t have it, and maybe I can just get about half of it. And, one thing I think about is that having a transcript helps me to multitask. If I only watch the video, I can only focus on the video. If I try to multitask while I’m watching the video, I won’t understand enough.
Brit: Yeah. It’s kind of an accessibility question too, right? Not just a language difference question, but…
Kristen: I always watch English TV, Spanish TV…I always have subtitles.
Brit: Me too.
Kristen: Because I hate when you’re like, ‘What did they say?’
All participants: Yeah!
Kristen: Fun fact, we do have a tool for captioning in KEATS, Caltura, and it does captioning for us, which is why we’re supposed to use it when we do videos.
Participant 1: But, I’m not sure if, because my English is not that good, well, not as good as a native speaker, but I think native speakers won’t have these questions.
Kristen: So, I honestly think that, especially with something. Well, I’m just going to brag for a minute, I just finished writing a book about this with Shaun [points], his office is right there, so that’s why I’m pointing, but it’s about how digital humanities is really complicated, and there aren’t many undergraduate degrees, there aren’t A-levels in it, so it’s all new. So, everybody coming in is starting off with, ‘What is this?’ Right? So, you can do an undergraduate degree in gender studies, but now it’s gender studies in a particular perspective. So, most people in the class are new to it.
Brit: Yeah, I also think it really is an accessibility issue. I think providing more context, providing transcripts, that’s a question of universal design, and therefore it’s there for everyone.
Certainly, it is true that both authors brought up the terms ‘accessibility’ and ‘universal design’ in this conversation, but what students were talking about was how they helped themselves to understand material, and the resources that made that easier for them, namely, transcripts, closed captioning, notes on context and/or questions to be considered before seminar sessions. Students always struggled more when they could not find these resources than when they could.
More importantly, universal design (or UD) is a key element of making education truly equitable, whether a teacher might anticipate having a multilingual or disabled student. UD is a relatively recent concept in education, only taking hold in the United States in the late 1980s/early 1990s, and only having been taken up in the U.K. through a UN statement in 1990 (Dalton, 2020). Universal design goes beyond making accommodations to imagining the classroom as a space that can and should provide equity to all students. It has been defined in the following way: 'According to [Universal Design Learning] UDL, the standard learner does not exist. Rather, it is learner variation that is standard, and the UDL framework offers principles and guidelines to design instruction that addresses this wide range of learners. The three core principles of UDL are Multiple Means of Engagement, Multiple Means of Representation, and Multiple Means of Action and Expression’ (Dalton, 2020, p. 3). In other words, all teachers should consider multiple ways any student can and might access the materials, as well as the activities, in order to improve learning for all.
UD does not require technology, though certain technologies can be extremely helpful in establishing universal design, especially technologies that provide captioning to videos or even in the classroom itself. At King’s College London, lecture capture was made available, and lectures were captioned as part of this process within twenty-four hours of the lecture. However, not all videos or tools used in reading lists or even within the classroom itself necessarily included captions. Including captions on every resource is one way for U.K. instructors to ensure universal design. Certainly, however, universal design or UD includes other concepts: such as making the context of reading clear; providing multiple approaches to an assignment; combining individual and group learning with lectures, etc. Ultimately, within UD, options are key (Tobin & Behling, 2018; Dalton, 2020; Gronseth & Dalton, 2020).
UD did not come up in interviews with faculty members, at least not in terms of what they try to do to make material accessible to their students. However, systemic barriers to enacting universal design did arise in these interviews. Namely, there were two reasons making UD n difficult: first, there were too many students to make many aspects of UD feasible; and second, teachers were often asked to teach a class they had no hand in designing, and were not able to make many changes to. Professor Alex Bassett pointed out the first issue, saying: ‘So, that was great when we had 40 students. I could cap it at 30-40 students. Obviously that cap got blown last year, and this year it’s going to be 90+ again…. When you’ve got 90 students, then I feel like we were getting a lot of repeats, or the same ideas’ (Personal Communication, 11 November 2019). In this particular instance, Dr. Bassett is discussing how difficult it is to not have repeated concepts in students’ essays, but the difficulty of huge class sizes goes beyond this: it makes it hard to provide timely and consistent feedback, not to mention to make sure that all students in a very large group have full, equitable access to all course materials.
As Teaching Fellow Andy Carter further points out, the difficulties of large class sizes are only compounded when instructors are expected to teach modules they have not designed or, in some cases, even been trained to teach: ‘Most of the modules that I have co-convened have been inherited, and along with that has been the assessment structure. So, I haven’t designed any assessments from scratch on the modules that I’ve convened or co-convened, I’ve just used the existing model that’s been given to me’ (Personal Communication, 24 April 2020). While Dr. Carter remarked upon how difficult this made it for him to provide effective feedback, it goes without saying that this also impedes his ability to provide truly universal design, especially since, very often, he has been given this module a week or so before the start of the semester. Without full familiarity with the module’s goals, topics, etc. it’s difficult to prepare materials enough ahead of time to also make sure they are universally accessible. Step one, then, for the university, is not only training faculty how to enact universal design, but, more so, making sure that the university provides the tools and time necessary to do so effectively.
So, what can we do?—Recommendations for moving forward
The remaining question is: how can we effectively enact a pedagogy of translanguaging and translingual policies within institutions of higher education in the U.K.? In some ways, this is already happening, whether we are ready for it or not: a majority of students, particularly at the postgraduate level, are already multilingual and multinational, and, in the past 5 years, largely Chinese nationals. Failing to engage with this material reality is simply no longer an option. But, beyond that, how could we potentially provide truly translingual pedagogy and contexts within our classrooms, programs, and very ideas of higher education?
There are many different ways to enact pedagogy that is flexible, responsive and scalable to student’s learning styles and needs. Flexibility in forms of assessment, responsiveness to student’s pre-existing knowledge in a subject, and scalable activities that promote engagement with lecture content are methods for encouraging translanguaging practices without overtly telling students they are learning critical and creative skills or blurring needed boundaries between instructors and pupils. We would like to share the following examples from the authors’ practices at King’s (which were, in turn, inspired by the work of Asao B. Inoue (2017) on how to develop fair assessments through translingual practice):
- Adapting assessment briefs so that students can collaboratively write essays. This approach to creative forms of academic writing was developed for two reasons. First, during the Pandemic, a shift to online teaching often left students feeling isolated. Encouraging them to collaboratively complete assessments was an effort to facilitate networking and community building. Second, DDH has large student numbers. Group work is a strategy to provide useful and high-quality feedback.
- Final assessments as portfolios of revised work from the semester. Often, from a student perspective, formative assessments are perceived as busy work, instead of opportunities to practice. Likewise, from an instructor perspective, formative assessments can add administrative work to a module. Clearly linking formative assessments to module learning outcomes and students' final grades mitigates against these issues. It is also an opportunity for instructors to learn about what types of feedback students expect to receive, and for students to learn about their instructors’ marking practices. This creates a space to negotiate perceptions and understandings of success and learning.
- Workshopping difficult readings. DDH offers a range of creative media-based modules. There is also a strong Marxist and Critical Theory perspective throughout the curriculum. This can pose challenges for relating foundational works of theory to contemporary issues and technologies. Taking time to listen to student reactions to readings, and using their concerns, frustrations and critiques to structure lectures can encourage them to try readings, recognize why they are struggling and articulate their needs. It is also a way for instructors to practice distilling their interests and knowledge into a framework that builds rapport and empathy.
- Recorded presentations instead of in class presentations—This gives students the opportunity to practice, refine and edit their presentations. Students can ask for feedback on their presentation content (formatting, how well they've met the brief etc.). Classmates can view presentations and prepare questions (or responses to questions) ahead of class. It reduces the awkward process of keeping time and cutting students off if they go over.
- Instructor recordings of outlining, writing and editing practices—This can give students a good sense of how long it can take to complete an assignment and humanizes academic practices; moreover, it shows that it takes time to develop ideas (and that there is more than one way to write an essay). Overall, it creates a context for asking questions about 'what works' for working on research projects.
- Overtly linking lectures to assignments—Students can ask questions that are specific and direct to clarify expectations of their work. This practice helps students remember when assignments are due, how they can use course materials, and how they can ask for support. Moreover, this approach can work for many different creative briefs. For instance, making it possible for students to co-author 500-word blog posts for media analyses. In this type of assessment, students can actively apply theories of media analysis and production to a concise written exercise, and they can negotiate and express understanding through collaborative writing. Another example would be semester-long project work culminating in an annotated portfolio of key work outputs. In assessments like this, students are able to engage with practical work addressing their particular interests and reflect on their learning through structured written reflections about their working processes.
In each of these examples, students are encouraged to participate in the learning process by actively asking questions about lecture content and the methods their instructor will use to assess their learning. Proactively and routinely encouraging student engagement in critical discussions of learning fosters open channels of communication and possibly reduces anxieties about ‘asking dumb questions.’ Likewise, the flexibility and scalability of work carried out with peers destabilizes the notion that instructors are the only possible creative or critical experts within the classroom and offers opportunities to negotiate some of the administrative practices required for teaching.
At the beginning of our article, we asked: how can we provide truly translingual pedagogy and contexts within our classrooms, programs, and institutional frameworks? Our thematic analysis of focus groups and interviews carried out in 2019 demonstrates that students and teachers in DDH are all invested in learning that fosters critical thinking and creative practices. However, fostering empathetic, iterative, and inclusive teaching and learning is not a linear or simple process. We have summarised and analysed how translanguaging as a theory and practice can engender more inclusive and responsive pedagogy that fosters meaningful communication between teachers and students. We identified five key themes through our thematic analysis of focus group and interview transcripts: 1) Making the expectations for assigned writing clearer; 2) providing more consistent feedback; 3) using examples of student writing but limiting these to good examples; 4) discussing the context of readings and assignments; and, finally, 5) utilizing universal design. These themes were repeated across focus groups, both in their first semester of the MA program, and in the second semester, after students had had some time to fully acclimate to the rhythms of UK higher education and to receive their first graded work.
Overlapping interests in learning experiences demonstrate a willingness—from both students and teachers—to explore strategies for discussing learning strategies. The potential to foster dialogue about strategies for reading and writing as an iterative and collaborative process is key because it creates space to consider how diverse practices and experiences can come together within a learning environment. Namely, instead of emphasising language skills, it is possible to explore and extrapolate meaning which destabilises authority and assumptions (or presumptions) of knowledge. Much of our research reiterates findings and theories presented in research on pedagogy and practice—particularly in the context of higher education in the UK. In presenting multiple recommendations above, what we would like to add to discussions about good practices and reflective curriculum development are teaching and learning strategies that support critical engagement with language from perspectives of mutual respect and empathy. Acknowledging similar interests from the perspective of teachers and students is a place to start unpacking assumptions about ability and creativity that destabilise traditional hierarchies in higher education.