Associate ProfessorMichiko Weinmann

My research explores the nexus of language, culture and education in global contexts, bringing together Education and Cultural Studies perspectives. Through a transdisciplinary orientation drawing on deimperialising, multilingual and postmonolingual frameworks, my research contributes to a reconstitution of established notions of language, people and place towards more complex understandings that disrupt dominant discourses of nation, geopolitics and identity. My research focus engages approaches that are inclusive of and responsive to multilingual and transnational perspectives, ways of knowledge generation, intellectual equality, and new identity narratives. This multidimensional focus has both led to, and informed sustained work with education systems that seek to reframe Languages education curriculum and pedagogy, and internationalise higher education and the teaching profession.

Research expertise: Multilingual education; Languages, TESOL and EAL curriculum and pedagogy; teacher education; global mobility and study abroad programs; internationalisation of higher education; postmonolingual education research; students-as-partners.
Research methodologies: Curriculum inquiry; reflexive thematic analysis; discourse analysis; narrative inquiry; interview research; case study; policy analysis.

Research Projects
Projects commencing 2024:
* ‘Teachers-as-colearners’: Recurricularising language and literacy learning from a multilingual stance
This pilot project has been developed as a collaborative pilot study with the Melbourne Archdiocese Catholic Schools (MACS). The project aims to explore the experiences of classroom teachers, language assistants, curriculum and school leaders with a ‘Teachers as Co-learners’ (TCL) of Languages program in Victorian Catholic primary schools, and how working within a TCL of Languages approach has shifted the participants’ understanding of multilingualism, and their practice of language(s) and literacy education.
* Private online language education: Preparing English teachers for digital job-readiness
The purpose of this research is to inform English Language Teacher (ELT) education by relating the marketing and recruitment strategies of Private Online Language Education (POLE) enterprises to accounts of the employment trajectories of ELT students, graduates, and early career professionals. To develop a more comprehensive understanding of the employment trajectories of educators, this research will be situated within broader debates of the ‘gigification’ of the labour of language, along with the precarity faced by teachers and tutors in the ELT digital economy.

Current projects:
* Internationalising disciplinary knowledge, pedagogy, and practice of Languages pre-service teachers: Enacting COIL
This collaborative project with Karlsruhe University of Education (Germany) examines and evaluates the development of a shared curriculum across two international universities, engaging students in a multilingual and multicultural online collaborative learning environment though digital ‘third space’ platforms.
* Examining the languaging-mathematising nexus
This transdisciplinary study examines the theorisation of mathematising, language, and languaging from the perspectives of contemporary mathematics education, applied linguistics and multilingualism research. It seeks to generate new insights into how the learning of mathematical language development and conceptual understanding can be better facilitated and supported by a research-informed approach to interdisciplinary mathematics pedagogy.
* Navigating the curriculum resource marketplace
In response to the increased digitisation of learning and teaching, growing workload pressures and calls for ‘high quality’ curriculum resources, this project seeks to map Australia’s rapidly expanding curriculum resource marketplace and develop a quality framework to support stakeholders as they navigate this space.

Recently completed projects
* Students as multilingual and multicultural influencers
Placing student voice at the centre of their higher education experience, this project aimed to gain comprehensive insight into the lived experiences of multilingual and multicultural undergraduate students from regional areas. By foregrounding students as language learners and language users as key grassroots policy and curriculum actors, this project sought to amplify their voices by articulating and sharing their lived multilingual and multicultural experiences in their educational and social communities.