02 December 2025
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Story Anthony Mthembu
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Photo Kaleidoscope Studios
Local and international delegates who attended the second International Conference on Languages, Multilingualism, and Decolonisation Practices in Higher Education.
Successful and insightful; this is how the second International Conference on Languages, Multilingualism and Decolonisation Practices in Higher Education was described by local and international delegates who were in attendance.
The three-day conference, hosted by the Academy for Multilingualism at the University of the Free State (UFS) in partnership with the South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR) on the UFS Bloemfontein Campus, concluded on 27 November 2025. As such, Dr Nomalungelo Ngubane, Director of the Academy for Multilingualism at the UFS, indicated that one of the highlights of the conference was, “seeing young and emerging scholars from different countries sharing insights on how they are promoting multilingualism and inclusive teaching and learning practices”.
Focusing on decolonisation and decoloniality
Discussions on decolonisation and decoloniality within higher education formed part of the conversations that were at the forefront during the conference. In fact, during parallel sessions, several delegates presented their research as it relates to those sub-themes. These included co-presenters, Dr Nonjabulo Madonda and Prof Loyiso Jita from the UFS, whose presentation was titled, Decolonial assessment practices in Science and Mathematics teacher education: a systematic review. Kagiso Mahlatji from the University of South Africa (Unisa), on the other hand, spoke on a Reflection on the decolonial and multilingual approach to education: fostering inclusivity in South African higher education.
Furthermore, these sub-themes were discussed by some of the keynote speakers as they delivered their addresses. Prof Russell Kaschula from the University of the Western Cape (UWC) spoke about the teaching and learning of language and culture in South Africa, and how these have been decolonised and transformed. Therefore, he utilised an ethnographic approach to delineate the ways in which teaching strategies and pedagogies have changed over time. He highlighted, “The twenty-six universities in South Africa now have language policies and are forced to implement these policies and actively promote African languages in their teaching acts.” One example to which Prof Kaschula referred was a project he co-introduced at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 2004, in which all medical doctors must be proficient in English and Afrikaans.
Prof Vasu Reddy, Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Research, Innovation and Postgraduate Studies at the UFS on the other hand, gave a keynote address titled, Translanguaging, technology and the third space: multilingualism as a conduit for decolonised internationalisation and internationalised decolonisation. As part of his address, Prof Reddy used several key messages to argue the above topic. One such message being, “Multilingualism in this context acts as a conduit for decolonised internationalisation, because it disrupts and unsettles language hierarchies, and it affirms linguistic diversity.” In addition, he stated that it promotes epistemic justice, which he described as a process and not an event.
He also touched on the concept of decolonised internationalisation, describing it as broader connections with different knowledge systems and cultural identity, etc. As such, he argued that it is important to think about the ways in which decolonised internationalisation is used to make critical efforts to reform existing internationalisation practices by removing bias and promoting inclusivity. He also explained, “Decolonised internationalisation can provide more impactful and intellectually robust frameworks for transforming higher education.”
Consequently, as they reflected on the conference, delegates stated that those discussions would now positively influence their approach to multilingualism and decolonisation in higher education.