Visualizing a Multilingual College Experience

With the Black Lives Matter movement and BIPOC inclusion ever-present, what aspects are we forgetting to include in our efforts to diversify our educational world?

During my final year as a student at Pratt Institute, I became interested in the concept of Language Justice — the idea that everyone has a right to be heard regardless of the language they want to speak. I centered my final capstone project around this idea and explored the possibilities of editing public visual landscapes to make an area more multilingual-encouraging. All proposals set forth in this writing are based on my capstone design research &cultural probe, my experiences, and my colleagues’ experiences while attending Pratt Institute.

When students reach higher education, language is ironically left out of the conversation. English is too often used as a lingua franca and an assumed “all-inclusive” language to surround students. Language is a window to culture, background, and thoughtful communication. Preventing students from accessing these introspective and intrapersonal skills hinders the continuation of growth that institutions of higher education claim to offer. Who does higher education cater to? Who feels invited? Monolingual English speakers benefit from a system built by them, for them. What happens when we encourage an expanded multilingual learning experience in higher education? And how might we include and support multilingual students in their university education experience?