Enhancing intercultural learning: A virtual classroom integrating teaching, learning, and research – Kara Loy, Payel C Mukherjee
COVID-19 has gripped the world and, as with virtually every other sector, it has rocked academic institutions. In many countries, the classroom no longer functions as a physical space within an academic building. Instead it has had to be accommodated in virtual space, where teachers strive to relearn elements of teaching and interaction to stimulate student learning and achievement. Situating the virtual classroom as a locale of discourse and community-building in times of digital education is crucial, and there is much to be learned from recent efforts in this direction. We undertook an experiment that started in 2017, before we had any inkling of how the current COVID-19 crisis would make all of us think of online teaching and seminars as the new norm. This experiment produced some insights that have only gained relevance in the interim.
Our experiment originated in English Studies (English literature) with an initiative entitled Project in International Collaborative Teaching (PICT).1 Simply put, PICT was a model for multi-directional distance teaching and learning. It developed out of discussions between geographically distant faculty instructors2 who were interested in providing each other’s students with culturally contrastive ways of framing and addressing questions of shared importance. These instructors wanted to provide their students with international experiences of collaborative learning in virtual spaces. While such experiences are available through much larger initiatives (e.g., coil.suny.edu, soliya.net), we saw benefits in a directly faculty-initiated partnership that focused on core academic subjects. With an eye to local realities, the participating instructors designed opportunities for students to practice and refine professional skills that are widely acknowledged as necessary for future employment and civic productivity across a diversity of perspectives: collaboration / teamwork / interpersonal / relationship-building skills, communication skills, problem-solving skills, analytical capability, and resiliency (Business Council of Canada, 2018). It was a grandly ambitious plan, but in at least the last three of these categories, some progress could be detected.
It made sense for our experiment to take place in courses on English Literature. Students globally need more than ever to develop skills in perceiving and interpreting the varying conditions in which English text is written and read under diverse conditions. Classes in English literature are increasingly spaces where interpretations are developed to reflect and consider convergent and divergent values. In other words, PICT developed organically from the pedagogical realities of English literary studies. It was a logical step to connect classes internationally in order to bring further to life the need for students to refine their understanding of the plurality of voices that articulate and resist cultural suppositions underpinning politics, history, society, and even science. In so doing, we realized a project that contained several “high impact educational practices” including experiences of diversity and global learning around human cultures, writing-intensity, peer collaboration, and unscripted interactions with intercultural skill development opportunities (Kuh, 2008).
In autumn of 2017, we started casually with an emphasis on opening the boundaries of a regular classroom beyond the physical space by purposefully heeding and foregrounding contrastive values and ways of knowing. In real time, an instructor who embodied the Other came to virtually present in the classroom and worked in sometimes unexpected, counter-intuitive ways on the intercultural groundwork and the foreign literary text. As an example, an episode of our teaching had to do with locating the body in discontent in Barbara Gowdy’s “We Seldom Look on Love” and Mahasweta Devi’s “Choli ke Peeche” (translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak as “Behind the Bodice”). A resulting comparative dialogue between Gowdy and Devi’s texts impinges on the desire of the body through unusual experiences that are appalling to readers, not only within the same cultural framework but also to those seeking to read and interpret from outside. On two occasions (early and late in the collaboration), students in the participating classes (64 at Ahmedabad University in India, 14 at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada) completed a questionnaire eliciting self-assessments of cultural awareness through a series of Likert scale prompts. Measured together, the two sets of responses pointed to a slight increase in awareness of differences.
Students’ comments on the experience exhibited a range of results that focused on the social, cultural, critical and pedagogical components of the collaboration. Notably, the engagement and learning can be considered rich across one or another learning lens. For example, one participating student noted that, “The opportunity to interact with a professor from a foreign university really assisted in making understanding of the culture easier. Also, befriending new people from a new background was indeed a thrilling and learning experience.” Another summarised the experience this way, “How even after being so diverse in nature, these texts that we are reading have so much in common and have preserved a piece of culture in each and every one of them no matter the genre of the text. [S]ome of them are so raw, that they actually put you in the shoe and put you in that place, makes you uncomfortable and vulnerable so that you actually get to experience the diversity of between all of us as a society but the similarity with being humane [sic].” While the students across the universities were identifying interrelations between text and context and recognising cultural specificities, it is worth noting that ultimately, they were reaching for integral values.3
Collaborative teaching, and World Class Day (WCD)4, a spin-off initiative that offered an opportunity for students to present their research in an online forum to a global audience, have given us scope to work creatively within and beyond the institutional norms of our respective universities. Resulting research has become more dialogic in the process. This collaborative teaching model and the virtual conference generate respectful inclusion of alternative perspectives and reveal aspirational attributes that we have only begun to explore. At the same time, students and instructors have already shown indications of increasing intercultural awareness of the intersecting and varying ways in which research and scholarship are conducted across regional, national, and other boundaries. To recognise our changing circumstances but even more to expand and intensify learning and discovery, it makes sense to move intercultural awareness and critical literacy to the centre of literary studies in productive, engaging and collaborative ways. More than ever under COVID-19, this must happen online and across geographical delineations.
Acknowledgement
The authors are indebted to Professor David J. Parkinson, Department of English, University of Saskatchewan, Canada, for his guidance, support, and active involvement in the project, in several research endeavours, including this article. We are also grateful to Dr. Tracy Zou for her feedback and comments on the article which have helped us improve on the essay.
References
- Business Council of Canada & Morneau-Shepell (2018). Navigating Change: 2018 Business Council Skills Survey. Retrieved from https://thebusinesscouncil.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Navigating-Change-2018-Skills-Survey-1.pdf
- Kuh, G. (2008). High Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter. Retrieved from https://provost.tufts.edu/celt/files/High-Impact-Ed-Practices1.pdf
Note
For a discussion on the earlier version of the Project in International Collaborative Teaching (PICT), please refer to Loy, K. & Parkinson, D. J. (2019, January). What can no-cost international collaboration bring to students and instructors? Teaching and Learning Connections, 8. Retrieved from https://www.cetl.hku.hk/teaching-learning-cop/what-can-no-cost-international-collaboration-bring-to-students-and-instructors/
- 1 University of Saskatchewan College of Arts & Science Department of English. (2018). Project in International Collaborative Teaching. Retrieved from https://artsandscience.usask.ca/english/outreach/international-teaching.php
- 2 David J. Parkinson, formative participating instructor, is a professor in the Department of English, University of Saskatchewan. His research focuses on literature in Scotland in the later middle ages and Renaissance and his teaching centres on research methods and international collaboration.
- 3 University of Saskatchewan, Behavioural Research Ethics Board Certificate 17-416 (4 January 2018)
- 4 University of Saskatchewan College of Arts & Science (2020). World Class Day 3. Retrieved from https://artsandscience.usask.ca/event/2020/world-class-day/
