For over 65,000 years, the continent now known as Australia has been home to highly linguistically and culturally diverse communities. The most recent census reported over 300 languages being spoken and signed in Australian homes and communities, including 159 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages that continue to be used and revitalised, and are among the oldest continuing languages anywhere in the world. With around one in five Australian residents using a language other than English at home (ABS, 2016), it's natural that this rich linguistic plurality is reflected in the students across each stage of the Australian education system. Clearly, monolingual Australia is a myth, yet despite the increasingly multilingual makeup of Australian society, recognition for language diversity in education has largely been ignored amid monolingualising policy and discourse.
It is necessary to intervene to transform representations and practices around language that reproduce inequality (Smit, 2018). The idea is to move beyond positivist views about things as they are and move to a poststructuralist perspective on how the state of affairs has come to be what it is and how situations of inequality and injustice can be modified. From this perspective, it is important to ask if an educational policy that promotes equal opportunities and the empowerment of subjects means only teaching the linguistic resources associated with power or, also, challenging the norms that designate a limited set of resources as the keys for mobility and social change.
Despite (mostly rhetorical) efforts to improve epistemic inclusivity in education, it is still heavily influenced by Eurocentrism. White European ethnocentrism can sustain the existing status quo as the almighty curriculum is rarely ontologically or epistemologically questioned (Ocriciano, 2022). When it comes to knowledge production, those who do not belong to the privileged group are unlikely to do so as their own ways of knowing and being do not often qualify as valid epistemologies under the scrutiny of the European Method. Mignolo (2008) explains that the epistemic advantage of modernity establishes and perpetuates the Colonialism of knowledge and being. Thus, being ignored and dismissed as well as not being heard because of one's ways of knowing and being are not even good enough to be recognised as a way of knowing and being is called an epistemic injustice.
This presentation will discuss the onto-epistemic injustices faced by culturally and linguistically diverse university students. Despite the (mostly rhetorical) efforts to improve epistemic inclusivity in Australian higher education, the university is still heavily influenced by Eurocentrism, with a curriculum that is rarely ontologically or epistemologically questioned. Knowledge production is limited to a privileged few, while culturally and linguistically diverse students are excluded, and their ways of knowing and being are invalidated. This presentation will conceptually explore the ways multilingual students in Australian higher education are dismissed and unheard as a form of epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007).
