Introduction:
As a non-native English speaker and migrant educator in the UK, I reflect frequently on my education and experiences as a student, using these reflections to shape my work as an educator. When I first arrived in UK, speaking little English, I enrolled in a Physical Theatre Course. Despite the language barrier, the course leader’s inclusive approach left a lasting impression. Their pedagogy—marked by cultural awarness, intelligence, and emotional sensitivity—allowed students to use their native languages during improvisations, rather than enforcing English as the sole medium. Our linguistic differences were not treated as deficits but as creative tools that shaped meaning and expression. This environment offered space to adapt without shame or pressure.
What made this experience particularly powerful was how it required English-speaking tutors and students to adapt as well—listening, attuning to unfamiliar languages, and engaging with other modes of communication. It challenged the dominance of English, disrupted linguistic hierarchies, and reframed assumptions around nationality and belonging. Looking back, I doubt the tutor was consciously applying a formal inclusive methodology—it felt more intuitive than strategic. Yet, its impact was profound.
This experience continues to shape my teaching philosophy. While my European (Italian) background affords cultural proximity to British academia, I remain acutely aware of the linguistic and cultural alienation faced by many international students, particularly Mandarin speakers. These lived experiences underpin my commitment to intersectional, justice-oriented pedagogy.
My academic practice is rooted in embedding climate, racial, and social justice within the curriculum. This aligns with my role as Climate Justice Curriculum Developer at CSM. Over the past year, I have encountered challenges in integrating intersectionality into classroom practice. While students often understand it as a theoretical framework, it remains abstract and disconnected from their lived experiences.
The PGCert Inclusive Practice course has been instrumental in addressing this gap. It has encouraged deeper reflection on my own intersectional identity—beyond static categories of race, class, or nationality—and created space to listen meaningfully to others’ experiences of marginalisation. This process has helped me better integrate intersectionality into student learning as a practical, embodied experience.
Context: Teaching and Learning Environment
This report builds upon an intervention originally proposed for the BA Product and Industrial Design course at UAL, where I teach a Climate Justice workshop. The intervention centres on multilingual design strategies and translation-based practices, reframing language not as a barrier but as material for speculative and inclusive design thinking.
Delivered during the first-year, the Climate Justice module encourages students to explore design ethics, speculative practices, and the socio-political dimensions of climate justice. Many students are international, with a significant number of Mandarin speakers. In their first year, students are not only adapting to academic life but also to institutional norms often shaped by Western, monolingual, and ableist assumptions.
By embedding linguistic diversity and translation practices into the curriculum, this intervention seeks to decolonise pedagogical approaches and challenge Eurocentric frameworks. It aims to foster participatory learning spaces where linguistic, cultural, and embodied differences are recognised as integral to creative and critical practice.
This work reflects my broader role as a curriculum developer committed to embedding racial, social, and climate justice across creative education. It represents a shift from a model of inclusion as accommodation toward a justice-driven pedagogy focused on structural transformation and creative potential.
Inclusive Learning: Rationale and Theoretical Frameworks
Inclusion in design education demands a critical interrogation of whose knowledge, languages, and cultural practices are legitimised. Dominant pedagogies often centre Western, monolingual, and ableist frameworks. My intervention challenges these assumptions through four intersecting theoretical lenses:
- Intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989): Reveals the interlocking nature of race, class, language, and ability in shaping educational experience.
- Decolonial Pedagogies (Mignolo, 2011; Andreotti, 2011): Critique Eurocentric norms and foster epistemic plurality.
- Pedagogies of Discomfort (Boler, 1999): Encourage both students and educators to engage with the emotional labour of structural change.
- Inclusive Design (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018; Ghenis, 2022): Emphasise care, accessibility, and collective knowledge production.
For this Reflective Report, I will focus on the first intervention from my Formative assessment: Intervention summary proposal:
1. Multilingual glossaries (Intersectionality, decoloniality, design justice): Students co-develop glossaries of key terms in their native and target languages, treating translation as a creative, critical act. (Please refer to the blog post on “Formative assessment: Intervention summary proposal” for full context.)
The second intervention—Normalising translation tools: designing for multilingual futures—will be developed in the third unit and action research project.
Reflection: Developing the Intervention and Navigating Challenges
Conversations with peers and tutors during the PgCert course were instrumental in refining this intervention. In particular, Kwame encouraged me to critically evaluate its limits, impact, and significance, drawing on three key scholarly papers: Arafat & Woodin (2024), Raees & Simmonds (2023), and Kiesewetter (2024).
Here’s how I plan to use them in my intervention:
- Arafat and Woodin’s (2024) critique of English dominance in higher education highlights that, while my multilingual intervention creates more inclusive spaces, it still operates within a system where English remains structurally privileged. Embedding multilingual glossaries and translation workshops opens valuable space but may not disrupt deeper systemic asymmetries—such as assessment criteria, resource availability, or publishing norms that favour native-level English fluency. This underscores a key limitation: while fostering micro-level change, the intervention’s transformative potential is constrained without institutional recognition of multilingual scholarship and structural adjustments.
- Raees and Simmonds (2023) offer empirical support for strategic multilingualism, showing that students with growth mindsets and multilingual proficiency performed better in English learning contexts. This suggests that the glossary could enhance linguistic confidence and academic engagement. However, their finding that multilingualism doesn’t consistently predict success across non-language subjects reminds me that the impact may be domain-specific. To maximise effectiveness, I plan to combine the glossary with reflective and applied activities—such as speculative design workshops—so that translation directly informs creative outcomes.
- Kiesewetter (2024) critiques the UK’s internationalisation agenda for its reliance on uniform English-language frameworks, which risk homogenising academic cultures and marginalising diverse epistemologies. My intervention responds by repositioning multilingualism as a source of epistemic richness. However, as Kiesewetter warns, unless institutions support multilingual scholarly identities at the policy level, such interventions may remain tokenistic. Thus, the significance of these strategies depends on broader institutional commitments—not only in classrooms but in assessment, publishing, and curriculum policy.
Action: Implementation and Institutional Impact
The intervention will be implemented during the first six weeks of the Climate Justice module. Each week, we will introduce key terms and have non-English speaking students include translations in their native languages. In small groups, students translate terms both ways and link each term to a relevant product design case study. We will rotate student “editors” weekly to refine entries. We will integrate glossary use into reflective journals and concept presentations, encouraging citation and expansion of definitions. In addition, I will:
Address Limits
- Acknowledge that the structural privileging of English may constrain multilingual pedagogy (Arafat & Woodin, 2024).
- Initiate dialogue with colleagues and leadership to legitimise translated outputs in assessment and feedback.
Enhance Impact:
- Leverage Raees and Simmonds’s findings by integrating growth-mindset prompts and metacognitive reflection into the glossary activities.
- Ensure that translation practices feed directly into design tasks, making language work integral to creative outcomes.
Maximise Significance
- Collaborate with curriculum and EDI leads to align the intervention with UAL’s wide strategies.
- Document and evaluate outcomes to support policy-level recognition of multilingual design practices.
Evaluation: Learning and Future Directions
This process has reaffirmed that inclusive teaching begins with attentive listening—to silence, to complexity, and to lived experience. If implemented, I will evaluate the intervention through:
- Student reflections on language, identity, and participation.
- Increased engagement from students previously hesitant to contribute.
- Peer feedback on glossary and workshop outputs.
- Optional surveys assessing students’ sense of belonging and inclusion.
I am also interested in the broader institutional implications. Can language-inclusive pedagogy influence assessment frameworks, staff training, or academic publishing norms? This opens possibilities for structural impact beyond individual modules.
Conclusion: Positionality and Pedagogical Commitments
This intervention is rooted in my own intersectional identity: a white, European, non-native English speaker with access to academic privilege. Acknowledging these tensions is essential to my practice. Grappling with discomfort, contradiction, and complexity allows for a deeper engagement with justice-oriented education.
Ultimately, the goal is not to assimilate students into dominant academic norms, but to reimagine those norms altogether. Language and cultural difference are not deficits to be accommodated—they are sources of insight, creativity, and transformation. Through this intervention, I hope to affirm that inclusive design education must move beyond representation and toward meaningful structural and epistemic change.
References
Arafat, N. and Woodin, J. (2024). Opening up spaces for researching multilingually in higher education. Routledge.
Andreotti, V. (2011). Actionable Postcolonial Theory in Education. Palgrave Macmillan.
Boler, M. (1999). Feeling Power: Emotions and Education. Routledge.
Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex. University of Chicago Legal Forum.
Ghenis, A. (2022). Disability, Design, and the Politics of Care. Disability Studies Quarterly.
Kiesewetter, R. (2024). Reframing the “International” in UK International Scholarship. The Journal of Electronic Publishing, 27(1).
Mignolo, W. (2011). The Darker Side of Western Modernity. Duke University Press.
Piepzna-Samarasinha, L.L. (2018). Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. Arsenal Pulp Press.
Raees, C. and Simmonds, K. (2023). The impact of multilingualism and learning patterns. Cambridge Journal of Education, 53(5), pp.705–724.