Participants in western tertiary education are becoming increasingly diverse in origins and backgrounds and this has led to the claim that there is less shared understanding about what constitutes a university education than was the case as little as ten years ago. This increasing diversity is found in the staff and students in New Zealand universities and reflected in the New Zealand Ministry of Education’s data, in the literature of second language (L2) learning and teaching and in publicly available information on tertiary education. The well-known Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives has provided an explicit structure that has informed debates about the nature of educational experiences in secondary schools. This paper is a contribution to debates about the experiences that should form the basis of metaknowledge experiences of tertiary students and academics. An example of a curriculum is offered as a constructivist contribution to discussions about how to address the problems of making explicit metaknowledge that has historically been tacit. While the proposed levels and content are advanced in a New Zealand context it is expected that the issues raised will be relevant in other educational settings.

Keywords: metaknowledge, metacognitive knowledge, multicultural education, taxonomy of educational objectives