‘The rules above the bed’: academic language and learning as hospitality

ABSTRACT

In times of widening participation, Australian universities trade on notions of diversity, framing themselves as hospitable places of access and inclusion. In this space, Academic Language and Learning (ALL) practitioners may be seen as extending the welcome of the university through practices aimed at addressing students’ diverse needs. These include identifying students ‘at-risk’ of failure and attrition, conducting one-to-one appointments, and embedding academic literacies by team-teaching within disciplines. In this paper, we reflect on these practices through the lens of Derrida’s notion of hospitality, drawing on key themes such as the constitutive power relationships of hospitality, the aporia between conditional and unconditional hospitality, and hospitality as an ethics of difference and openness to the ‘arrival of the new’. For each of the explored practices, we problematise the institutionalised framing of ALL practitioners as hosts in benevolent universities providing an unreserved welcome to the student ‘foreigner’. We examine the practice of identifying students-at-risk and question a conditional hospitality that risks closing the door on the unforeseeable that students may bring. Our reflection on the managerially devalued one-to-one appointments highlights hospitality as ethics, with each appointment presenting a crisis of choice in responsibly welcoming student difference. Team-teaching exposes the ambiguity of the ALL practitioner ‘being at-home’ in embedded contexts while presenting the possibility for disrupting established roles and practices. Engaging with Derrida’s hospitality thus allows us to uncover power dynamics shaping the role of ALL practitioners and offers the possibility of ethical responsiveness to student difference and a radical opening to the new.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic English
• hospitality
• ethics
• philosophy
• higher education
• diversity
• students-at-risk
• access
• inclusion

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Academic Support and Development unit at Victoria University in its final year as an academic department for giving us the time, space and democratic context to establish the Language Education and Philosophy reading group, out of which the current paper emerged.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Based on Greek mythology, Derrida refers to the potential threat of the foreigner to completely overtake and eradicate the host as ‘parricide’ (Derrida & Dufourmantelle, 2000).

2. In Derrida and Dufourmantelle (2000), Derrida refers to a section in Klossowski’s novel Robert Ce Soir (1953) which describes the hospitality rules written down, framed and displayed over the bed of guests.