Multilingualism as an asset – devising a Toolkit for academic staff at a British University

This article describes a practitioner-oriented research project that explored the often invisible aspect of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in UK Higher Education: students’ multilingualism and its potential mobilisation as an asset for learning. The project applied a collaborative, emergent methodology to gather three different sources of data to better understand the complexity of students’ multilingual repertoires and how these could be exploited as an educational resource. The data sources included a literature review, a student questionnaire investigating the extent and uses of multilingualism in a cross-section of students across different disciplines, and two online workshops with faculty which explored their responses to the questionnaire results and possible educational strategies for promoting multilingual approaches. The findings from these sources were utilised to devise an Inclusive Multilingualism Toolkit for Educators aimed at promoting debate and the design of more effective pedagogic practices, across our university and the wider learning and teaching community.

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