The pronunciation of students’ names in higher education: identity work by academics and professional services staff

ABSTRACT

Changes in the national, linguistic and ethnic profiles of students in UK higher education mean that students’ names are also likely to have become increasingly culturally diverse. In this article, we develop new empirical and theoretical understandings about how student-facing staff working in higher education in England experience cultural diversity in students’ names and the accompanying uncertainty of how some names should be pronounced. Using data from our qualitative studies we show that staff typically framed the pronunciation of names as an equalities issue, including in terms of power relations between themselves and students. Drawing on theorisations of identities as social processes, we analyse the ‘front stage’ and ‘backstage’ activities used by staff to manage the pronunciation of students’ names. We argue that, through these equality-framed activities, staff are doing ‘identity work’ in relation to their own selves and, importantly, also for students whose named-linked identities are minoritised within the ‘whiteness’ and ‘Englishness’ of higher education institutions in England. We conclude that, to support the pioneering identity work already undertaken by individual staff, policymakers in higher education should develop and implement ‘whole institution’ initiatives in recognition of the pronunciation of students’ names as a key equality, diversity and inclusion issue.

KEYWORDS:

• students’ names
• equality
• diversity
• identity work

Introduction

Names are at the nucleus of people’s identities because they signal individual civil-legal identities and familial and kinship affiliations, as well as socio-cultural identities – gender and social class, for example (Finch, 2008; Pilcher, 2016). People’s names are also linked to ethnic heritages of race, language, nationality and/or religion (e.g. Edwards & Caballero, 2008; Khosravi, 2012; Wykes, 2017; Zwysen et al., 2021). Changes in the profile of student populations in higher education in the UK are likely to have ushered in a wider diversity of names, including names that are minoritised within the predominance of this sector’s ‘institutional whiteness’ (Ahmed, 2012; see also Arday & Mirza, 2018). The growth in the number of international students and in students of Black, Asian and other minoritised ethnicities studying in higher education (Department for Education, 2021; Universities UK, 2018) are two changes that signal how student populations in the UK have become less mononational, monolingual and/or monocultural than previously and, relatedly, that the names of students are also likely to be increasingly culturally diverse. However, the significance of cultural diversity in students’ names for higher education in the UK (for example, for experiences of higher education, and for the development and operation of institutional equality, diversity and inclusivity practices and policies) remains a largely unexplored topic.

In this article, we advance global knowledge and understandings of the significance of cultural diversity in students’ names through drawing on findings from our qualitative studies of cultural diversity in students’ names in institutions of higher education in England (Pilcher, 2022; Pilcher & Deakin-Smith, 2022). Our innovative contribution stems from our examination of how student-facing staff (whose institutional roles imbue them with power and authority vis-a-vis students) manage students’ names when they are unsure how those names should be correctly pronounced. We explore how staff in our studies (some of whom themselves had minoritised ethnicities and names) experience the pronunciation of students’ names in order to (i) establish new empirical and theoretical understandings of staff as doing multifaceted ‘identity work’ that co-constructs students’ identities within learning communities and (ii) to identify actionable ways that practice and policy in higher education might better engage with the pronunciation of names as an important equality, diversity and inclusion [EDI] issue. In the opening section of our article, we review evidence on students’ names including research literature examining why the pronunciation of students’ names is an issue of significance. We show that while there is a small body of studies which give insight into students’ experiences of the pronunciation of their names, evidence about how academic staff and student-facing professional services staff experience the pronunciation of students’ names is extremely limited. Using an ‘identities as social processes’ framework, we argue that recognising student-facing staff as co-constructors of students’ identities deeply enriches understanding of the significance of students’ names and also has the potential to change thinking about ‘identity work’ that (re)occurs in higher education and in other types of organisations too. In the main part of our article, we present findings from our research on the pronunciation of students’ names in higher education in England. We show that individual student-facing staff reported routinely undertaking a range of activities of their own devising in an effort to respect their students’ named-based identities and that they were motivated to do so by ethoses of equality, diversity and inclusion. However, staff participants in our studies did the work of co-constructing students’ identities largely without any institutional guidance or support, whether at a local level or nationally. We conclude that, to better support the identity work already undertaken by some pioneering staff, policymakers should develop and implement ‘whole institution’ initiatives in recognition of the pronunciation of students’ names as a key EDI issue impacting upon students’ identities and affecting learning communities in higher education.

Students’ names in education: contexts and evidence

Anonymous marking is one way that policymakers already recognise students’ names as relevant to the upholding of principles of EDI in higher education. The assessment of students’ work via a strategy of anonymous marking requires that students’ identities are masked, e.g. by using an identification number on their assessments in place of a name. A key rationale of anonymous marking is that it is perceived to reduce conscious and unconscious bias in assessment processes (Sharp & Zhu, 2020), whether on grounds of familiarity with a particular student, or on the basis of protected characteristics such as a student’s gender or sexuality, and/or race and ethnicity, or social class. According to Sharp and Zhu (2020), anonymous marking has been widely adopted within institutions of higher education, including within the UK, despite some criticism of the practice and mixed evidence for its efficacy. Beyond anonymous marking, there is also recognition within some institutions of higher education that students’ names matter at the point of their ceremonial graduation. In England, for example, some degree awarding institutions have administrative procedures to try and ensure that, during ceremonies, graduating students’ names are publicly pronounced correctly (e.g. London School of Economics, 2023).

However, worldwide, and irrespective of the level or sector, there are few studies of the significance of names and naming in education. The ‘voluntary’ use of typically English ethnic names by international students studying in higher education institutions in English-speaking countries has received some attention (e.g. Chen, 2016). The use of ethnically English names is argued to be a pragmatic choice driven by international students’ concerns about the writing, spelling and pronunciation of their original names and, relatedly, ease of memorability for host educators (Harris, 2016; Smitt, 2019). However, such choices may negatively affect the self-esteem, health and well-being of international students (Ammigan et al., 2023; Zhao & Biernat, 2018). Researchers in the US have highlighted the significance of students’ names in education by examining the ‘involuntary’ naming experiences of students whose ethnicities are minoritised (e.g. Bucholtz, 2016; Kohli & Solórzano, 2012; Payne et al., 2018). In these studies, mispronunciation of students’ names by educators are conceptualised as ‘racial microaggressions’ (Kohli & Solórzano, 2012) which result in ‘indexical bleaching’: the removal of the ethnoracial sociocultural information encoded in a student’s name (Bucholtz, 2016, p. 275). Name mispronunciation is argued to reinforce cultural paradigms of privilege and power, with disbenefits for students’ learning (Payne et al., 2018; see also Laham et al., 2012). Studies have also examined how students feel when their names are (mis)pronounced by their educators (Kohli & Solórzano, 2012; Payne et al., 2018). In our own studies of students’ experiences in higher education in England, reported in more detail elsewhere (e.g. Pilcher & Deakin-Smith, 2022), students told us that constantly having to deal with mispronunciation of their name by staff is hard, tedious and repetitive work that can affect motivation, restrict their participation in learning activities and undermine their feelings of belonging in higher education learning environments. However, mispronunciation as a ‘negative naming incident’ (Pennesi, 2017, p. 28) may bother some students more than others (Zhang & Noels, 2021).

There is, then, a small body of studies giving insights into the significance of cultural diversity in students’ names in education including from the perspective of students themselves. However, in these studies staff experiences of their students’ names tend to be surmised and attributed – e.g. to cultural insensitivity or laziness – rather than directly researched and evidenced (e.g. Kohli & Solórzano, 2012; Zhang & Noels, 2021). Studies by Harris (2016) and by Pennesi (2014), whose focus lays elsewhere, do show that some staff in higher education make concerted and principled efforts to try and respect students’ cultural identities by correctly pronouncing their names. However, beyond these studies, evidence on staff experiences of the significance of cultural diversity in students’ names in education is lacking. In this article, using England as a case study, we significantly advance knowledge and understanding of this topic by presenting original research evidence on how student-facing staff experience the pronunciation of students’ names, within a higher education system characterised by the circulation of high-profile EDI discourses (Bhopal & Pitkin, 2020), institutional whiteness (Ahmed, 2012) and the othering of people whose ethnicities are ‘not white’ (Arday et al., 2022), and/or of people whose names are minoritised by what we term ‘institutional Englishness’ (see, for example, Wheeler, 2016). ‘Institutional whiteness’ can be defined as an engrained ‘habit’ (Ahmed, 2012, p. 38) of an institution within which and through which white people, their bodies, and cultural norms (and we specify here, their names) are systemically privileged as the norm. We draw on this theorisation to conceptualise ‘institutional Englishness’ as a related engrained institutional habit within English higher education, if not also within UK higher education (and other types of organisations) more widely. It entails the systematic privileging, within and through an institution, of the English language, of ethnically English cultural norms, and our focus in the article, of names, and the consequential minoritisation of, for example, ethnically Welsh, Scottish, Irish or Polish languages, cultures and names.

Identities as social processes

In the sociological framework that informed the design of our research, and which underpins our argument in this article, the self and socio-cultural identities of individuals are theorised as being interactively and collaboratively (re)produced through social processes of co-construction and interpretation (e.g. Goffman, 1956, 1968; Mead, 1934). Identities are therefore understood to be (re)produced, in and through social relationships, within specific locales, and to be conditioned by relations of power (Lawler, 2014; Scott, 2015). These processes involve ‘identity work’, which we argue can be undertaken not only by individuals themselves in relation to their own identities (e.g. Brown, 2022 and references) but also in relation to the identities of others, e.g. by sustaining and supporting those identities or, conversely, by destabilising and denigrating them. The concept of ‘embodied identities’ (e.g. Howson, 2004; Jenkins, 2008; Lawler, 2014; Shilling, 2012) emerged within identities as social processes perspectives to emphasise the significance for identity work of the intertwined relationship between bodies and identities. The more recent concept of ‘embodied named identities’ (Pilcher, 2016) extends recognition of that significant intertwining within identity work to include people’s names (see also Goffman, 1968). We draw on these lines of argument to theorise names as key to people’s doing of identity work, whether in relation to their own embodied identities or, as we especially focus on in this article, the embodied named identities of other people. We analyse the experiences of one sub-group of actors (student-facing staff) in one type of organisation (institutions of higher education) to show that, as elsewhere, names are ‘power-full’, (re)producing embodied identities, relationships and inequalities through the ideas, values and meanings they contain and convey (Pilcher, 2016, 2017). Whether they say students’ names correctly or incorrectly, or avoid saying them altogether, we show that student-facing staff are doing multi-faceted identity work which contributes to the co-construction of students’ embodied named identities, and, through this, to students’ experiences within higher education more broadly.

Methods

This article draws on data from two linked studies, both of which examined student and staff experiences of the pronunciation of students’ names in the context of EDI frameworks operating within higher education in England. Jane Pilcher, whose names are ethnically English, was motivated to research this topic as a sociologist of people’s names and specifically because of her own experiences as a white British mono-lingual lecturer unsure how to pronounce some students’ names. Hannah Deakin-Smith, whose names are ethnically English, and Chloe G. Roesch were researchers on the studies and are respectively, white British and white American. Chloe G. Roesch frequently experiences mispronunciation of her surname.

In line with the focus of this article, we describe methods of the studies related only to participants who were student-facing staff. The first study (Study A), undertaken in the autumn term of 2021 by Jane Pilcher and Chloe G. Roesch, was a micro-scale qualitative study which explored experiences of the pronunciation of students’ names at one university in England (Pilcher, 2022). Staff participants were recruited to this study through a call (distributed to members of teaching and learning forum within the university) for volunteers to take part in a focus group interview via video-call software about experiences of the pronunciation of students’ names. Nine people who had either an academic teaching role (n = 8) (e.g. professor, associate professor, lecturer) and one who had a student-facing professional services role (e.g. international students’ advisor) participated in the online focus group for staff. The second study (Study B), undertaken by Jane Pilcher and Hannah Deakin-Smith in the academic year 2021–2022, was a larger England-wide mixed-methods study exploring experiences of the pronunciation of students’ names (for more details about this study, see Pilcher & Deakin-Smith, 2022). Staff participants were volunteers recruited through national social media callouts and through our own social networks in higher education. Ten people who had an academic teaching role (n = 6) and four who had a student-facing professional services role (e.g. learning support tutor) participated in one-to-one semi-structured interviews held through video-call software.

Combining staff participants from Study A and Study B meant that we were able to analyse interview data on experiences of the pronunciation of students’ names from 19 staff from nine different institutions of higher education in England. Of the 19 participants across the two studies, 14 were women and five were men. In terms of ethnicity, 10 participants identified as white British/European, three as British Chinese, two as British Asian, two as Chinese, one as British Caribbean Mixed Heritage and one as Turkish. All participants in the two studies were offered anonymity, and a pseudonym either of their own choice or one carefully chosen by researchers to reflect their original name. Some participants chose to use their real first name. The studies operated within ethical protocols of informed consent, anonymity, confidentiality, and data protection (British Sociology Association, 2017) and received favourable opinions from the relevant ethics committee at Nottingham Trent University. Qualitative interview data from the two studies were analysed using thematic analysis (Miles and Huberman 1994), with coding frames developed from research questions, participants’ responses to interview questions, and in dialogue with existing work on names and identities (e.g. Finch, 2008; Pilcher, 2016) and on EDI in higher education (e.g. Ahmed, 2012; Bhopal & Pitkin, 2020).

In the next section, we present our findings organised around two related and recurrent themes that emerged from our thematic analyses of interview data: (i) ‘framing’, which refers to ways that higher education staff portrayed their understanding of the pronunciation of students’ names in terms of, especially, equality concerns and also the dynamics of power relations between themselves and students; (ii) ‘activities’, or the context-dependent individualised practices of identity work used by higher education staff to manage their pronunciation of students’ names.

Framing the issue of the pronunciation of students’ names: equality, belonging and power relations

As previously explained, staff participants in our two studies were all volunteers. We did not ask these participants directly what had motivated them to take part, but we were able to infer reasons from comments they made. For example, it became clear that some participants had themselves experienced mispronunciation of their own name and/or had changed their name due to pronunciation issues. These experiences of their own embodied named identities had sensitised them in their interactions with students:

My name is Xiang, but I prefer to be called Jennifer because I think it’s easier for everybody so they can correctly pronounce my name … .So that’s why I’m interested in this project. You know, not only me working as part of the International Office dealing with you know students from various countries around the world, but also [because of my own name]. (Jennifer, International Students’ Administrator, Study B)

Other participants were motivated to take part in the research because, as part of their professional identity and practice as educators (Nästesjö, 2023), (mis)pronunciation of students’ names was already an issue of interest and concern for them.

You know, there’s a group of people who are really passionate about this. Some of us with personal experience … some of it just because of the way we care about students … [But let’s] not forget the people that aren’t here today. (Harriet, Lecturer, Study A)

The implication of Harriet’s comment (‘the people that aren’t here today’ i.e. not taking part in the research) is that there are ‘lesser’ colleagues who do not recognise the pronunciation of students’ names to be an issue of importance and are not reflexive about the issue in their professional practices. It is clear that, across both our studies, our engagement with staff participants on the issue of the pronunciation of students’ names had an element – as Harriet herself described it – of ‘preaching to the choir’. However, for at least one of our participants, taking part in the research had itself raised her consciousness of the issue:

I never realised this was a big issue you see or, you know, that it was even a discussion that was being had by colleagues. (Elsie, Learning Support Tutor, Study B)

We noted earlier that the ‘big issue’ (as Elsie put it) of the pronunciation by educators of students’ names is theorised by US scholars in terms of racial equality, diversity and inclusivity (Bucholtz, 2016; Payne et al., 2018) and for Kohli and Solórzano (2012) mispronunciation/renaming is a form of racial microaggression. In our studies, ‘microaggression’ was a term used by only two staff in their accounts of how other colleagues had responded to the pronunciation of students’ names. For example:

[My colleagues’] actual acts of mispronouncing student names and kind of being a bit lazy with it, and some of what I would actually class as microaggressions.//Sometimes if I say [a name] with a pronunciation that I think is correct, they’ve literally just gone ‘What?!’ and like I’ve just said something that is completely incomprehensible, which I feel like there’s definitely a microaggression. (Katy, Lecturer, Study B)

Here, Katy is describing responses from colleagues to diversity in students’ names which show how cultures of ‘institutional whiteness’ (Ahmed, 2012) result in the minoritisation of some names and/or how what we conceptualise as ‘institutional Englishness’ constructs ‘not-from-the-English language’ names, including Welsh, Scottish and Irish names, as ‘other’.

While the term ‘microaggression’ may have featured rarely in staff participants’ accounts of their experiences, there was nonetheless a widespread framing of the pronunciation of students’ names as an EDI issue. Some participants did frame the issue specifically in terms of racial and/or cultural equality. For example:

I do feel that if you ask students if there’s a wider issue that relates, broadly speaking, to respect, in a kind of racial sort of a context … … [names] being part of a wider systematic issue in relation to respect or discrimination. (Harriet, Lecturer, Study A)

You know somebody constantly sort of saying your name wrong and has got to make you feel I suppose less included. And I think particularly because it’s based on, related to, its potentially ethnic background and some racial origin and then it could fit with this sort of white hegemony of the university or HE in general. So, I think that it’s in terms of I suppose the work that’s kind of going on and trying to sort of decolonise and anti-racist pedagogies. Part of that needs to include and making sure that people’s names are, you know, not just dismissed. (Sarah, Associate Professor, Study B)

In her account, Sarah located the issue of the pronunciation of students’ names within specific EDI frameworks extant in English higher education (i.e. decolonising the curriculum, anti-racist pedagogies) designed to counter ‘institutional whiteness’ (Ahmed, 2012); see also; Arday & Mirza, 2018). Similarly, other participants cited, e.g. the ‘Success for All’ programme, or ‘The Equality Act’. However, participants generally emphasised respecting students’ names in order to make higher education a space of inclusivity and belonging:

So, in terms of kind of impacts on students and some of my students have been pretty vocal in saying that when names are pronounced incorrectly, it means it makes them feel a little bit less, less seen, less heard, and that’s … [what] they carry with them for a lifetime. (Meera, Lecturer, Study A)

Yes, 100% [it’s an EDI issue] … . it has such a huge impact on a person’s identity and sense of belonging. (Lian, International Students’ Advisor, Study B)

I see a lot of issues in the classroom with group rapport when students aren’t comfortable saying each other’s names, but also when the teacher isn’t comfortable saying particular people’s names. (Laura, Lecturer, Study A)

Only a minority of staff participants in our studies (all of whom were professional services staff) did not frame the pronunciation of students’ names as an issue of equality, diversity and inclusivity. One of these participants rejected framing the pronunciation of students’ names in these terms, and two others framed it in terms of general ‘professionalism’ or just being ‘nice’:

I don’t know really [if it’s an EDI issue]. Maybe it’s just nice, just nice to get it right, isn’t it? We don’t like to, don’t like to insult anybody. (Kathryn, Course Administrator, Study B)

I think that’s the professional way to carry on and to pronounce the student’s name, right? (Elsie, Learning Support Co-ordinator, Study B)

For participants who worked in academic teaching roles, though, power relations between students and staff were a further theme that featured prominently in their framings of the pronunciation of students’ names as an equalities issue. There was concern that students might not correct a lecturer’s mispronunciation of their name, either out of fear of reprisals, or for other reasons:

You just wonder actually, how much students don’t come to us and say ‘Actually this is wrong’ because they feel there’s gonna be some sort of academic punishment or penalty for doing so, like. (Sam, Lecturer, Study A)

I think it’s a problem in as much as I can say to students, ‘It’s OK for you to correct my pronunciation of your name’. Then, particularly [international] students who aren’t comfortable in English, that sort of power relationship, are students going to be comfortable especially in a group setting, putting their hand up and saying, ‘Oh you’re pronouncing my name wrong’? (James, Associate Professor, Study B)

Here, James highlights particular difficulties for international students for whom English is not their first language in the contexts of the ‘institutional whiteness’ and/or the ‘institutional Englishness’ of higher education in England. Other participants said that international students might be reluctant to correct mispronunciation of their name because of the high status of teachers and/or elders in their culture. For some participants, a key issue for all students is their lack of confidence linked to their age and relative immaturity:

This comes back to what we were saying earlier about being of a certain age. At that age when you get confronted with prejudice, you kind of have no choice but to laugh it off. Whether that’s….as somebody international or somebody with a difficult to pronounce name, as a 20-year-old, there’s a power imbalance… And then 20 years later you go, ‘That was totally not OK’. (Harriet, Lecturer, Study A)

These findings show that, especially for academic teaching staff, links between names and embodied identities meant that they regarded the (mis)pronunciation of names as a nuanced and complex EDI issue, one interwoven with myriad paradigms of privilege and power circulating within institutions of higher education whether based on race, ethnicity, nationality, language, hierarchical role-based status, age or some combination of these positionalities. For most of our participants, engagement with the EDI-framed issue of the pronunciation of students’ names can be theorised as identity work, undertaken here in relation to the ongoing (re)production of their own identities as ‘good’ professionals and morally decent people who work with students in locales within which multiple EDI policies frame their practices (although, as we note later, not specifically in relation to cultural diversity in students’ names). Names-related identity work by student-facing staff can also be theorised as co-constructive activity important for the embodied named identities of students, as we explore next.

Managing the pronunciation of students’ names: front stage and backstage identity work activities

Staff participants in our studies reported using a range of activities when they were unsure how to pronounce a student’s name. In our analysis of these activities, we find it useful to draw upon Goffman’s (1956) dramaturgical theory of identities as social processes. We especially adapt Goffman’s conceptualisation of identity work as being undertaken in different locales, including ‘front stage’ in public settings where there is an audience, and ‘backstage’, where preparatory rehearsals take place before a public ‘show’.

In the public setting of a classroom, when faced with a name they were unsure how to pronounce, a front stage strategy reported by several staff participants was to avoid saying it altogether.

I’m sure sometimes, I’m certain at times I’ve done that, and you just configure the sentence to avoid saying the name … And you know you find yourself sometimes saying it really quickly or really quiet perhaps a little bit more quietly than you normally would. (Peter, Associate Professor, Study B)

I wouldn’t want to go back [to ask the student] again and again, so sometimes I … would avoid … Yes, I have avoided instances to call students something. (Iris, Associate Professor, Study B)

When staff (consciously or unconsciously) avoid saying some students’ names because of worries about pronunciation, they nonetheless co-create those students’ identities, albeit negatively. Name avoidance is identity work which results in the embodied named identities of particular students not ‘called into being’ within learning environments and in other informal and formal spaces within higher education institutions. In learning environments, this reduces students’ opportunities for learning via participation in class activities. In other informal and formal spaces in universities where staff and students interact, it may damage relations between staff and students and so inhibit the expansion of students’ social networks. Our findings of self-reported name avoidance by some staff (an activity which literally erases ethnoracial sociocultural information encoded in students’ names) add to understandings of name-based racialised or cultural microaggressions by showing that it is a practice found in higher education in England as well as in the experience of students in lower-level education environs in the US (Bucholtz, 2016; Kohli & Solórzano, 2012).

On the whole, though, and across our two studies, staff participants reported using identity work activities to help them to at least try to say students’ names correctly. Here, a common front stage strategy was to directly ask a student how to say their name correctly. This was easier for professional services staff who were more likely to encounter students on a one-to-one basis and so had no ‘audience’ for their co-constructing identity work.

I just …[say] ‘I’m sorry… I don’t want to butcher your name. Can you tell me how to pronounce your name correctly? That way going forward I can, you know, go ahead and say it correctly and I don’t want to offend you’. (Lian, International Students’ Advisor, Study B)

I’m not scared of saying ‘Look, I don’t want to get your name wrong. Please tell me how it’s pronounced’. (Rish, Careers and Employability Advisor, Study A)

In front stage settings of classrooms, where other students are a wider audience for any identity work activities used by teaching staff, the situation is more complicated. For some teaching staff, the co-production of identities of students with ‘difficult-to-pronounce’ names in group settings could be achieved through the identity work of asking all students to introduce themselves:

Actually, when I first meet a new class, I go round, and I’ve got the photo sheet and I’ll say, you know, introduce yourself and the name you want me to call you… in case that’s different to what I’ve got on the sheet. (Victoria, Lecturer, Study A)

Some participants implied that, in group settings, asking specific students how to say their name correctly was culturally insensitive and likely to cause embarrassment because it highlights their difference. For James, it was only during the course of his interview that he came to this realisation:

I’ve never thought about it before, but obviously because if you’re asking someone [in a group setting] how to pronounce the name then you are singling them out as having a difficult name. I’ve never really thought about it in that sense before. I’ve just literally just tweak[ed] that now. So yeah, I guess that makes it a little bit problematic. (James, Associate Professor, Study A)

The ‘problematic’ nature of asking about name pronunciation in group settings lead some participants to seek clarification about pronunciation only in one-to-one meetings with students:

On a one-to-one basis, I would take the time [to ask about correct pronunciation]. But in a larger group of people, [no] not to embarrass the students. Because I have learned that students feel embarrassed when they’re put on the spot. (Lorelei, Professor, Study B)

Whether in one-to-one meetings or groups settings, ascertaining or directly asking about correct name pronunciation could merely be an initial step in a wider set of extensive identity work activities by higher education staff and through which the co-construction of students’ identities took place. These might include a mixture of front stage and backstage activities. For example:

I ask students to, in my first session, to write their names down on a paper and… in big letters and put it in front of them. And then I go around asking them to introduce themselves and I ask them to say their name and I make little notes on the side to say how they pronounce. And that’s, uh, then helps me next time, even if I can’t remember and I bring that paper - my cheat page - in the future seminars. (Iris, Associate Professor, Study B)

If I get [their name] wrong, I get them to correct me [in a one-to-one meeting]. And if I still can’t get it, I’ve got them to record it into my voicemail, my phone, and I practice it and practice it until I get it right. (Sam, Lecturer, Study A)

In these examples, staff describe making phonetic notes or audio-recordings (front stage activities) to aid their correct pronunciation of students’ names and their practising of names (a backstage activity). Other backstage identity work activities reportedly used by participants depended on factors such as having a list of names in advance, and/or having time to prepare, and/or the numbers of students involved.

So, I… literally Googled how to say each name and then wrote it phonetically … , because I wanted to make sure … We had the names in advance [so] I could do that, but I’m not 100% sure it’s correct in how it’s done. (Sarah, Associate Professor, Study B)

I think, uh, if I have time to prepare beforehand, I will ask my colleagues, you know, like who are experienced with dealing with international students or we have a, you know Indian colleagues…. [Or] I Google it. (Jennifer, International Students’ Administrator, Study B)

Using internet resources as a backstage aid to pronunciation was mentioned by other participants too, although not always favourably. In the words of Iris (Associate Professor, Study B), ‘Google can also get them wrong, so’. Another strategy used by staff to undertake co-constructive identity work for students in their institution was to draw on their own particular language skills (see also Pennesi, 2014), or, like Jennifer, the language skills and knowledge of their colleagues. In 2021, 16% of academic staff working in UK universities were EU nationals and 16% had a non-EU nationality (Higher Education Statistics Agency, 2023), a figure which confirms that, as mentioned by Jennifer, higher education staff are diverse in terms of languages spoken and potentially at least can be a rich source of peer-to-peer knowledge about the pronunciation of names.

One participant, in addition to her teaching activities, had had the role of corralling informal ad hoc resources to try and ensure that students’ embodied named identities were respected in graduation ceremonies held by her faculty/school (see also Pennesi, 2014). Graduation ceremonies, are, of course, very much front stage settings with literal stages and sizeable, significant actual audiences. Sara (Study A) talked frustratedly and at length about the backstage ‘hours’ she spent doing graduation-related co-constructive identity work. Her self-directed backstage activities included consulting with a range of colleagues who had linguistic skills and using online searches. Sara said that she then drew on the knowledge she gained from these backstage activities to create phonetic notes for use during the (front stage) graduation ceremony:

[T]he hours of time we try to work out how to pronounce names and create phonetic [notes]. Writing down phonetically. And of course, we’re not using the official phonetic alphabet, so the way I write it down phonetically for the [orator] to say may not be the way [they] understand it anyway. (Sara, Associate Professor, Study A)

Sara suggested that the backstage hours of hard, collaborative identity work she had undertaken to try to ensure that graduands names are correctly pronounced might in the end fail because, just like using Google, phonetic notes are not a failsafe strategy to ensure correct pronunciation of names. Through these types of front stage and backstage activities to try and say names correctly, we argue then that staff were not only performing their own professional identities (Nästesjö, 2023) by doing ‘diversity’ work (Ahmed, 2012) but they were also trying to co-construct the embodied named identities of students.

Discussion

In this article, we have shown that the cultural, linguistic and national diversity of students studying in higher education in England, and an accompanying diversity in their names, means that student-facing staff can find it challenging to pronounce some of their students’ names correctly. Our data on experiences of student-facing staff clearly position the cultural diversity of people’s names, and particularly the pronunciation of students’ names, as key issues of equality, diversity and inclusivity for institutions of higher education in England. Most of our staff participants in our studies had a strong EDI ethos and several had minoritised embodied named identities themselves. Respecting the embodied named identities of students and enhancing feelings of belonging in higher education spaces through correctly pronouncing names was therefore an important part of their own identities and professional practices. We argue that our staff participants were not only doing identity work in relation to their own selves (e.g. Brown, 2022) but, importantly, on behalf of those students whose embodied named identities are minoritised. As we have shown, a concern on grounds of EDI to try to improve their own – and/or others – pronunciation of students’ names had led staff to use a range of innovative activities of their own devising and in differing locales and contexts.

Our focus on the pronunciation of students’ names and how staff contribute to an EDI informed co-construction of students’ identities opens up new empirical and theoretical understandings of the myriad types of identity work operating within higher education organisations characterised by multifarious systems of power, including age and gender, ‘institutional whiteness’ (Ahmed, 2012) and, within England at least, what we have termed ‘institutional Englishness’. Our study is the first to focus on staff experiences of the pronunciation of students’ names and through it we uncovered a range of context-dependent activities deployed by staff to try say students’ names right and thereby respect their embodied named identities; we outline below how our evidence on staff identity work activities can feed into the development of policy and practice to better address cultural diversity in students’ names in higher education. In this article, we have also added to knowledge and understanding by extending theorisations of identity work by individuals as activity that is self-focussed (Brown, 2022) to include activities that are undertaken by individuals to sustain and support the identities of other people, or, conversely, to destabilise and denigrate them. Thus conceived, ‘identity work’, along with our data-driven theme of ‘framing’ and our concept of ‘institutional Englishness’, represent compelling and analytically generalisable constructs for approaching matters of identity work across a range of institutional and organisation locales, both within and beyond education.

Whether undertaken bi-annually in preparation for graduation ceremonies, daily in encounters with students, in front stage and/or in backstage locales, the various identity work activities described by staff in our studies in relation to the pronunciation of students’ names were evidently ad hoc, the result of their own individual motivation and efforts, and oftentimes, not entirely trusted to work. These findings are significant for two reasons. First, the ad hoc and individualised features of the identity work activities show that staff were improvising solutions to deal with the issue of the pronunciation of students’ names in the hope that they were using the right tools and doing the right thing. This points to a lack of training, resources, guidance and/or policy about the pronunciation of students’ names at an institutional and/or national level or, at least, a lack of knowledge about its availability. We did ask the 19 staff participants in our studies, who worked in nine different higher education institutions in England, if they knew of any training, guidance, or policy in their current and/or previous institutions and/or nationally that addressed the issue of the pronunciation of students’ names. None did, and given that participants in our study were mostly individuals for whom the issue of students’ names was already important for their own identities, they would surely be amongst any groupings of staff most likely to know about provision of that sort. Second, because staff activities in relation to the pronunciation of students’ names reported on in this article were ad hoc and individualised, these activities were undoubtedly hidden from the institutional gaze of their workplaces. As such, the pioneering EDI-infused identity work activities around students’ names undertaken by some individual higher education staff in our studies are unlikely to be known about, acknowledged, overseen, evaluated or rewarded at institutional level, despite the prominence of EDI policy discourses more generally. Institutions of higher education are, like other organisations, ‘holding environments’ (Petriglieri & Petriglieri, 2010) that can enable and/or constrain the identity work of individuals within them, including in relation to EDI policies and practices. According to our research, there seems to be little or no ‘enabling’ of identity work linked to saying people’s names right within most institutions of higher education in England (see also Pilcher & Deakin-Smith, 2022. The ‘Say My Name’ initiative at the University of Warwick is an especially notable exception here – University of Warwick, 2023).

Implications for research and practice

Our major contribution in this article is our examination of the identity work done by some student-facing academic and professional services staff in the co-construction of students’ embodied named identities. Our focus is on the pronunciation of names but our conceptualisation of higher education staff doing identity work as co-constructors of students’ identities could influence future equalities-focused research related to other aspects of students’ minoritised identities in higher education, including LGBTQi+ identities. Our exploratory, small-scale studies richly detail aspects of staff experiences of the pronunciation of students’ names, albeit in one national and linguistic context. Research needs to be undertaken in other national and linguistic contexts – including in Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish universities – to extend scholarly understandings of how higher education staff deal with students’ names when they are unsure how to say them correctly. Our two studies recruited participants whose identity work activities can be described as (mostly) positive and motivated by a concern to respect students’ embodied named identities. Scope remains for research on student-facing staff whose inattention to the correct pronunciation of students’ names contributes more negatively to the co-construction of students’ identities and experiences within higher education.

Our findings about how student-facing staff manage students’ names when they are unsure how to pronounce them enable us to identify actionable ways (some suggested by our staff participants themselves) that practice and policy in higher education can better engage with this important EDI issue. Building from the pioneering ad hoc activities of individual staff we recommend that institutions of higher education, as ‘holding environments’ for identity work (Petriglieri & Petriglieri, 2010), develop and implement ‘whole institution’ solutions – and in ways that do not merely symbolically address (Ahmed, 2012) the pronunciation of students’ names and the respecting of people’s embodied named identities. Holistic and potentially transformative strategies might include, first and foremost, the incorporation of names and identities (including cultural variations in naming conventions, and the multiple and intersectional social and cultural significance names have for people’s identities), and name pronunciation, within EDI training for all staff (tailored to meet the differing needs of, e.g. academics and professional services staff) and within induction activities for all students, whether domestic or international. Provision here would help shift people’s understandings of names away from the quotidian and taken-for-granted (Pilcher, 2016) and help to nurture a fertile ground from which to develop further policies and enact practices. Second, existing digital students’ records systems within higher education institutions should be integrated with fit-for-purpose software specifically designed to aid the correct pronunciation of names through capturing audio-recordings of individuals saying their own name (e.g. NameCoach, 2023). Third, institutions should develop and implement policy to encourage all staff and all students to include an audio-name recording (created, for example, through NameCoach) in their email signature. This is a route to normalising declarations of the pronunciation of names. Fourth, there is a pressing need at both local and national level for the development of resource banks to widely publicise and distribute guidance and tools (including resources relating to the correct pronunciation of names) to aid better understanding of the social and cultural significance of names.

Identity work and diversity work in organisational settings such as higher education are inevitably enacted within contexts where institutional power circulates and is reproduced (Ahmed, 2012; Brown, 2022). Yet ‘whole institution’ strategies incorporating multifarious solutions would enable a shift in the identity work involved in correctly saying students’ names from the ‘front stage’ more firmly to the ‘backstage’. In so doing, ‘whole institution’ strategies would also help rebalance the significant identity workload currently borne by individual student-facing staff – and, of course, by students themselves. Such solutions would systematically engineer into the whole duration of a student’s period of study and across all aspects of a student’s day-to-day interactions with staff an embedded recognition of the importance of names for their embodied identities, for their experiences of higher education and for issues of equality, diversity and inclusion more broadly.

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the Trent Institute of Teaching and Learning, and The British Academy for research funding, and all participants in both of the studies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The underpinning research data for Study B are available in the NTU Data Archive under a CC-BY licence at: https://doi.org/10.17631/rd-2023–0013-ddat

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the British Academy under grant number SRG2021\210816.

Notes on contributors

Jane Pilcher

Jane Pilcher is Associate Professor of Sociology at Nottingham Trent University. She was lead investigator in the British Academy-funded project ‘Say My Name’ which examined experiences of the (mis)pronunciation of students’ names in higher education. Currently, Jane is lead investigator on the adoption name stories project funded by The Leverhulme Trust. Both these projects reflect Jane’s interest in people’s names, identities and inequalities.

Hannah Deakin-Smith

Hannah Deakin-Smith completed her PhD in the geography department at Loughborough University in 2012, focusing on international student mobility. She was then a qualitative researcher on the European Union funded project ‘POCARIM’, exploring academic mobility. Hannah joined the School of Social Sciences at Nottingham Trent University in 2021 working on the British Academy funded project ‘Say My Name’, examining student and staff experiences of name (mis)pronunciation in higher education. Hannah is currently a researcher on the adoption name stories project.

Chloe G. Roesch

Chloe G. Roesch, BSc, MA is a doctoral researcher at Nottingham Trent University investigating ‘International Students’ Sexual and Reproductive Health Care: Gaps in Access and Experience’. Chloe has been a health educator and advocate in three countries and has successfully campaigned at the national level for curriculum change. Her stakeholder-led praxis seeks to unite voices of university and student stakeholders.