In an educational institution, both the students and the staff have a choice of accommodating oneself to the existing ways of being and acting, trying to change them, or just deviating away from them, still staying in the community, but on the verges. When one is accepted inside an organisation, rules, policies and procedures are laid upon the person. Often the person is as if relinquishing the rights of acting certain ways while bound in a certain organisational space. Because of these particular processes and dynamics, how can promoting diversity ever be possible? Diversity might find spaces within small cracks, but what about as an organizational vision, as an underlying purpose?

Marko Teras, “Of Diversity and Hospitality“

A win of sorts: FutureLearn have quietly amended their Code of Conduct (although they still have “spam” in quotes as though they’re holding it in chopsticks, and this still makes me giggle.)

The final three points now read like this:

11. I will not share my contact details on the FutureLearn platform.
12. I understand that I am a FutureLearner, and do not have access to the same resources and services as a student attending the university that is running my course.
13. As the FutureLearn community’s first language is English, I will always post contributions in English to enable all to understand, unless specifically requested to do otherwise.

#11 is more specific, #12 is more elegant, and #13 has introduced a new slightly odd detail to the requirement to speak English.

Two days ago, #13 read like this: “I will always post in English to enable all to understand (the FutureLearn community’s language is English).” The new phrasing of the first half, that the community’s first language is English, takes the good step of acknowledging that there are other languages around the place. FutureLearn is after all actively courting markets in which these other languages may be more important to their users than the English they’ll have to use if they want to sign up. But this is also the compromise that most Anglophone universities arrive at, as they go prospecting in the same markets for paying guests.

The requirement is still there that learners will always post in English to enable all to understand, and I’m still stuck on hoping that FutureLearn could be a little less upbeat about the positives for all of having to learn in your second or third language. The puzzling new bit is unless specifically requested to do otherwise. So now I’m trying to imagine the circumstances under which FutureLearn might specifically request their communities to break out in Klingon. Maybe this was their concession to international Talk Like a Pirate Day?

But the most interesting thing is the fact and the speed of the change itself. This is consistent with their stated commitment to soliciting feedback and acting on it quickly. Doug Clow, who works with many of those involved in FutureLearn and was involved in the alpha testing, has written a constructive and careful post commending their decision to build a new platform from scratch, and their timely launch.  As he points out, it’s too early to tell whether this new platform or the learner experience is any good:

But they’ve leaped over some major hurdles already. More importantly, can it develop in to something really, really good? I’m optimistic – on balance and very cautiously optimistic, with many caveats and all that. We’ll see.

The evidence of the Code of Conduct changes is that FutureLearn are serious about progressive product development, not just in terms of the coding of their platform, but the overall cultural coding of the community they hope to build.

But I honestly don’t think they’ve fixed their problem with the assumptions and virtues they’re attaching to English, so in case they’re listening, here’s how I’d put it.

“The FutureLearn platform delivers courses developed and assessed in English. We appreciate that there are many languages used in our community, and we suggest that English is used as the common language for postings and discussion to enable us all to participate.”

Marko Teras, my Finnish collaborator in the project of thinking about how Derrida’s ideas about hospitality might work well in higher education settings, has written an outstanding critique of student diversity initiatives, that captures for me the ethically messy nature of the business markets in which we’re now working. In these market settings, cultural and language diversity becomes both an irritant, a compulsion, and a problem to be managed with soothing performances of inclusivity and celebration. Rustichello puts it bluntly:

Rarely, and only in the most infantilising circumstances, are universities interested in the knowledge that international students bring with them. Usually this will involve some kind of national costume, or culinary style, just to make it clear their knowledge is domestic, in both senses.

And this is what universities sell to international students; the opportunity to comply with an approved system of knowledge. Education, framed as empowering and respectful of agency, becomes an alibi for an ongoing system of superiority and exploitation. To say it even plainer: universities sell colonial discourse to the victims of colonialism.

As Rustichello points out, we typically talk about higher education in Australia as an export commodity, that outperforms even beef.  But what this means for our everyday practices is that we are competing to attract students whose presence then unsettles us and disrupts our routines. Under these circumstances we develop increasingly circumscribed rituals of hospitable welcome, in which the very first thing that students learn about us involves the rules that we impose on them to preempt their delinquency. In doing this we expose our hospitality for what it is: something closer to a kind of guarded hostility, a wariness of all the ways in which they’re different to us. Nowhere is this clearer than when we require them to write in English, and then penalise them for their expression, or demonise them for what we choose to call cheating as they struggle to make sense of the rules of our home. (And let’s not forget the drama that attended the accusations of “foreign students” “cheating” in US MOOCs last year. In fact, just googling “cheating in Moocs” makes for very discouraging reading.)

What practical steps can be taken to deal with any of this?