Academic language and learning in higher education: a call to Derridean hospitality

ABSTRACT

Academic Language and Learning (ALL) is a relatively recent practice field in Australian Higher Education (HE). Throughout its history, the institutional positioning of ALL has varied significantly in line with an incessantly changing HE environment. Most recently, neoliberal policies and discourses are reconfiguring the professional identities of ALL practitioners and complicating their relationship with students, increasingly depriving both of a hospitable home in universities. Implicit in these discourses is also the depoliticisation of the ALL teacher–student relation and assumptions of mastery of these educators over their object of knowledge, the students. Rather than aligning ALL practitioners with neoliberal subject positionings, this conceptual paper explores the framing of ALL practitioners, particularly their relations with students, in terms of Derridean hospitality. The article details Derrida’s deconstruction of the concept of hospitality in order to (1) examine the complex power dynamics that structure the relationship between ALL practitioners and the student guest/foreigner and (2) insist on an ethical responsiveness to student difference based on responsibility for the other and a radical opening to the new. Derrida’s ideas of hospitality, the paper argues, offers an alternative language for thinking, speaking, and enacting ALL practitioner–student relations and opens new ethico-political horizons.

KEYWORDS:

• Language and academic skills
• Higher education
• Derrida
• Hospitality
• Deconstruction
• Ethics/Politics

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dr Stephen Price, Dr Britta Schneider and Dr Michael Hallpike for their invaluable support in thinking through this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dana Chahal

Dana Chahal is an Academic Skills Advisor for research candidates at RMIT University. Dana has over 20 years of experience teaching and researching in Higher Education in Australia and internationally. In the last 14 years, Dana has worked as an Academic Language and Learning (ALL) practitioner in Victorian universities. While she has investigated empirically different areas of ALL practice (such as genre pedagogy and peer learning), her most recent research focuses on integrating theoretical/philosophical ideas in conceptualising the role of ALL practitioners in tertiary institutions.