Diversity of all kinds and at all levels in today’s societies has pushed traditional views on expertise development and learning at its edge. Former ways of training young researchers and professionals within universities are challenged by these demands. The purpose of this research is to examine types, phenomena and accounts of expertise - related to multi-lingual, multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary diversity - as constructed by the students after having accomplished the first study year of the trilingual (research) Master program Learning and Development in Multilingual and Multicultural Contexts at the University of Luxembourg (http://www.multi-learn.org). This program is designed as a response to the aforementioned challenges by offering not only learning and expertise building about diversity, its contexts, and theoretical approachability, moreover, providing a set-up of diversity - in terms of cultures, languages, interdisciplinarity, multimediality and working formats. Specifically, the design of the Master’s program responds to the tangible diversity within the society in Luxmbourg (roughly, 500.000 inhabitants, with 55% nationals, 45% non-nationals, 173 nationalities, 120.000 cross-border commuters everyday into Luxembourg) and the educational challenges this involves (e.g., heterogeneity in groups of learners, high rate of schol failure, demand of highly specialized but multilingual workforce, workplaces marked by interculturality etc.) by integrating reality-based diversity issues as the object of the higher educational learning. The guiding research question when investigating into the learning achievements as available from the Master students is bi-fold: Firstly, the devices of higher educational work (e.g., design of group-work, assignments etc.) have to integrate and foster diversity in and as learning. Which principles for designing these devices can be applied? Do they work and if so, how? Which means are need to assess the quality of these devices? Secondly, the learners bringing in their diversity and gaining expertise in approaching diversity are at the center of the program. How do learners perceive their learning and their learning achievements? Which patterns of accounting can be identified? And how do learners establish realtions and causalities between the devices as offered by the program and their learning? Socio-cultural approaches to learning and professional development highlight the importance of interaction with other professionals and the emergence of knowledge in and through these interactions. Having interaction at its center, language is argued to possess specific functions in constructing meanings in and as social practices. By means of these activities, participants construct, change, organize and remodel social realities. Doing things, explaining things to each other, assessing and accounting for the realities as experienced is accomplished by means of language and the multiple configurations which are co-constructed in interactions and other mediational activities allowing for expertise development in highly diverse settings. Following these grounds of reasoning, educational solutions which implement diversity - in terms of cultures, professional backgrounds and educational experiences - allow for configuring the working and learning together as widening and deepening of students’ understanding and developing their conceptual and social skills to work and learn together.

The study applies disource-interactional instruments for participants for collecting, analyzing and assessing two sets of data as elicited from the participants of the study (here, the Master students). Data of this research is collected in two loops. First, the students (n=20, highly diversified on all levels - multilingualism, multiculturalism, disciplinary backgrounds, professional backgrounds, age etc.) have written an instructed journal of their first year academic development and professionalisation. These journals have been analyzed by applying discourse analysis (DA) in aiming to identify the core dimensions of auto-perceived learning achievement and academic development. Second, specifically set up students’ group meetings have been video-recorded and transcribed (according to educational CA). Then the analysis examines interactional ways to construct academic development in the multilingual and multicultural group. DA is used as a frame of reference and as a methodological tool in alignment with educational CA with regard to workplace encounters.

Putting the specific case of a learning environment at its center, the current study provides conceptual and methodological insights allowing for defining elements for further intervention and implications of the design of expertise-bound learning environment in higher education. Firstly, the practices deployed for describing and accounting for incidents of expertise development as given by the participants indicate which (and if) patterns of such development can be represented, in relation to systematic diversity-bound accounts thereof and/or their constructions in terms of language-as-activity. Secondly, methodologies assessing development and its specific perception as held by the participants involved in such a process are discussed with regard to their suitability and the potential for sustaining the development of expertise as traced. Finally, potentials and conditions for interventions from the students’ in diversity-bound developmental programs are outlined. The study contributes to empirical and case-valid work which focuses on the social elements in academic development in multilingual and multicultural contexta in order to a) better grasp the issue of expertise and b) analyse how this is perceived (as pertaining meaning) by the person engaged in the developmental process.