From pseudo-voicing to epistemic agency: confronting ethnocentric canonical knowledge in multicultural higher education

Student voice is widely promoted as a pathway to inclusion in higher education, yet in multicultural classrooms it often remains epistemically constrained. This study introduces the concept of pseudo-voicing to describe pedagogical conditions in which students are invited to speak but lack epistemic authority to influence how academic knowledge is constructed and interpreted. Drawing on an autoethnographic study of fifty Arab undergraduate students in Israel, the analysis examines classroom episodes and students’ reflective texts using a voice-centred relational approach. The findings show that student resistance to canonical theories signals epistemic misalignment between theoretical frameworks and students’ realities. Across the data, voice was present, yet its epistemic status varied depending on how pedagogical responses engaged contradiction. The article proposes the 6C Model as a discursive heuristic specifying conditions under which pseudo-voicing is sustained or disrupted, demonstrating how engagement with contradiction can enable epistemic repositioning and reshape how canonical knowledge is interpreted.