A translanguaging approach to doctoral supervision: leveraging students’ multilingualism as intellectual resources

Translanguaging theory and practices have enabled multilingual spaces where students’ full linguistic repertoires are valued, explored, and utilized by educators as resources across educational settings. However, research reporting supervision pedagogies incorporating international doctoral students’ multilingualism as intellectual resources in doctoral research education in Australia remains scant. This paper reports a case study that explored a PhD program at an education faculty in an Australian university. The data, participant observation, and semi-structured interviews were collected from seven multilingual doctoral students, and nine supervisors. These data were analyzed within the framework of post-structuralist translanguaging and translanguaging pedagogy. This research found supervisors demonstrated a consistent translanguaging stance and valued their students’ multilingual resources for knowledge production. Through spontaneous and planned translanguaging pedagogical practices, they endeavored to enhance students’ deployment of their multilingual capability for knowledge production.