EXAMPleS
Find out more about two exemplar programs aimed at giving youth meaningful
cross-cultural learning experiences through sustained online dialogues and digital
co-creation projects. And learn about two initiatives that seek to prepare students
for international exchanges and to foster digital literacies among teacher candidates.
SOLIYA CONNECT
Soliya Connect is a well-established program that was founded in the United States in 2003 by Lucas Welch and Liza Chambers (Soliya, n.d.). Launched in the aftermath of 9/11, it has focused on bringing students from North America and Europe into dialogue with students from the Muslim and Arab world. It works primarily with university-aged youth, aged 18+, a time of important identity work in the lives of most people.
Soliya reports that its pioneering cross-cultural education program now reaches more than 5,000 young adults a year and has linked students in 30 countries over the past 16 years. It has been led for the past decade by Waidehi Gokhale.
An award citation from the Ottawa-based Global Centre for Pluralism states: "Discussing current events with trained facilitators, participants from the United States, Canada, Europe, Middle East, North Africa, and South and Southeast Asia learn that people’s identities are multi-dimensional. By voicing and listening to one another’s stories, they gain greater understanding and build empathy" (Global Centre for Pluralism, 2019).
Soliya is aware that power asymmetries arise within the dialogue groups stemming from ethnic, gender and linguistic advantages, local education styles and other factors. Seeking to “harness these dynamics for deeper learning,” it has made efforts “to complicate our dialogue further and explore all different types of differences, power dynamics, and the notion of privilege” (Fournier-Sylvester [citing personal communication from a Soliya staff member], 2016).
Soliya has also contributed to the virtual exchange field by endeavouring to rigorously evaluate its programs. In 2013, it began working with cognitive neuroscientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who have developed or adapted various tools to measure empathy. Soliya wanted to know whether it was really possible to foster empathy through its online dialogues and to see measurable effects in before-and-after studies.
The MIT researchers found positive results among Soliya Connect participants compared with control groups and also determined that the effects persisted, at least in the short term (Virtual Exchange Coalition, 2015). Soliya is now working with researchers on longitudinal studies to assess whether this enhanced "intergroup positivity" after online contact in its Connect program is "sticky" over the long term (Global Centre for Pluralism, 2019, November 22).
Emile Bruneau was involved in the MIT studies and now continues similar research as director of the Peace and Conflict Neuroscience Lab at the University of Pennsylvania. He observed that “Soliya’s Connect Program illustrates ‘virtual contact’ as a new effective type of intervention that could dramatically expand the scope and extend the reach of intergroup contact, and achieve broad change in intergroup perceptions and attitudes” (Virtual Exchange Coalition, 2015).
AT A GLANCE
Learn more about Soliya and the research it supports in this audio slideshow (3:53).
In November 2019, Soliya received a Global Pluralism Award honourable mention from the Global Centre for Pluralism.
Hear students at Menoufia University in Egypt describe their virtual exchange experience in this Soliya video (3:37).
Chart shows one finding from the studies conducted by researchers at MIT comparing Soliya Connect participants with control groups (Virtual Exchange Coalition, 2015).
ERASMUS+ VIRTUAL EXCHANGE
The European Union’s Erasmus+ Virtual Exchange program is a newcomer in this space, with big ambitions. It began in March 2018 as a response to growing intolerance in Europe following the “migrant crisis” of 2015. The EU has explicitly linked the program to its efforts to counter radicalization and violent extremism, noting that “intercultural dialogue plays a crucial role in promoting respect for diversity, pluralism, and human rights” (European Commission, 2017).
Implemented by a consortium that includes the Sharing Perspectives Foundation and Soliya, the Erasmus+ Virtual Exchange program is directed at all youth aged 18 to 30, including refugees, living in 43 countries in Europe and the Southern Mediterranean. By the end of 2019, it aims to have engaged 16,000 participants, about 8,000 a year.
The program also hopes to reach thousands of young adults outside of formal education through free, two-week "social circles," which include a two-hour facilitated dialogue each week, among other activities. Titles of the first sessions included “Can we get out of poverty?”and “What methods for anti-racism?” Sessions planned for 2020 (in English, French and Arabic) include “How does your identity background define your place and opportunities in society?” and "What is the role of youth in taking action against climate change?”
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Before meeting online for a facilitated dialogue on a topic, Erasmus+ Virtual Exchange participants read the same articles and watch the same short videos. In a course offered in autumn 2019, Cultural Encounters: Perspectives on Populism, they also co-created an "intercultural video dialogue project":
"In the online group meetings, participants collaboratively think up questions that they deem important to ask the wider public. They will take these questions out to their communities and invite a peer such as fellow student, friend or sibling to give a
1-minute answer. Collectively, participants can expect to collect 100s [of] video interviews that are designed to present a broad spectrum of perspectives on the impact of populism and national identity across Europe and the Southern Mediterranean" (Erasmus+ Virtual Exchange, 2019).
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See the course outline and the assignment manual, which provides instructions for the "videologue" project.
It also contains information on course expectations and assessment, as well as the badges (or digital certificates) participants receive for taking part in 70% of the dialogues and completing 70% of the assignments.
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AT A GLANCE
Learn more about the Erasmus+ Virtual Exchange program in this audio slideshow (3:25).
Above, a sample Erasmus+ Virtual Exchange video, How can human rights counter populist authoritarianism? (5:26)
Students in the Perspectives on Populism course watched this video produced by Migration Matters, before meeting online to discuss it (5:26). The program, which makes its videos freely available, is amassing a trove of informative content. A few other examples:​
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Do walls work? (6:28)
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Erasmus+ courses also include videos curated from other sources. For example,
in a segment focused on exploring identities, participants watched this TED talk by writer Taiye Selasi, Don’t ask me where I’m from, ask where I’m local (16:04). They were encouraged to submit video responses, such as this one by Muna Omar (5:24).
STUDENT EXCHANGES
As Canada grapples with preparing young people to thrive in the 21st century global economy, it has focused on building university students’ intercultural skills through increasing the number who take part in international exchanges for a semester or year abroad. The report by the Study Group on Global Education noted that about 33% of undergraduates go abroad for part of their degree in France, 29% in Germany, and 19% in Australia and the United States. “By contrast, only 11 per cent of Canadian undergraduates do so” (Paris & Biggs, 2018). The report recommended launching a national initiative, Go Global Canada, “to support 15,000 Canadian post-secondary students per year going abroad within five years, rising to 30,000 per year within 10 years” – or about 25% of all students (Study Group on Global Education, 2017).
The report did not mention virtual exchanges or their potential both for preparing students to go abroad and for providing worthwhile cross-cultural experiences for the 89% of Canadian students who currently do not do so. The European Union, meanwhile, through its Erasmus+ Virtual Exchange program, does see a role for the facilitated online dialogues to offer valuable intercultural opportunities for the majority of students and other young people who do not go abroad, whether by choice or lack of opportunity. (By 2020, the EU also wants 20% of its university graduates to have taken part in study or training abroad as part of their degree programs, up from the current rate of about 7.5% (European Commission, 2017).)
A number of universities are now incorporating online conversations between pairs of students in different countries into their pre-mobility preparation programs
(Batardière, M. et al., 2019; and watch the video, at right). There could be scope for introducing more substantive and sustained online dialogues, along the lines of the Soliya or Erasmus+ virtual exchange models, into such programs.
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Those more demanding and rewarding interactions could also help prepare young people from abroad who are planning to study in Canada, which now hosts more than 570,000 international students (up an astonishing 73% since 2014) (Teotonio, Keung & LaFleche, 2019). Amid growing concern that incoming students receive inadequate support after arrival, virtual exchanges could begin to address the problem by forming part of robust preparatory programs.
AT A GLANCE
A chart from the report by the Study Group on Global Education (2017) indicates that the rate at which Canadian students go abroad for any part of their undergraduate degree lags behind the levels seen in many other countries.
This animated video was created at the University of Limerick, Ireland, for students in pre-mobility preparation programs (4:42).
TEACHER EDUCATION
AT A GLANCE
A screen capture from a slideshow put together by virtual exchange researcher and practitioner Robert O'Dowd (which can be viewed below) shows an OECD chart suggesting that Canadian teacher candidates are no more likely to have studied abroad as part of their post-secondary education than their peers. The global rates range from 1% (Vietnam) to 37% (the Netherlands), with Canada (represented here by Alberta) in the bottom half of the chart at 10%.
Virtual exchanges could also become an engaging and useful part of teacher education programs, to enhance critical digital literacies among the teachers and mentors of the next generation. Some work has begun in this area, though there is more to be done.
A recent large-scale pilot project funded by the European Union, called EVALUATE (Evaluating and Upscaling Telecollaborative Teacher Education), brought together instructors from 34 teacher training institutions in 16 countries. In 2017-2018, they organized 25 virtual exchanges involving more than 1,000 student language teachers, with a view to fostering the teacher candidates' digital literacies and intercultural and linguistic competencies. Those exchanges were based on the class-to-class telecollaboration model that has been evolving in foreign-language education over the past three decades.
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The Open University's Mirjam Hauck, one of the instructors involved in EVALUATE and an author of its final report, cites European Commission figures when she writes that
"the project was motivated by the fact that only 20–25% of students in Europe are taught by teachers who are confident using technology in the classroom. At the same time, teachers need to be prepared for the classrooms of tomorrow and equipped with the skills and competences to teach in culturally diverse contexts, to collaborate across disciplines and to use technologies in innovative ways. This is in stark contrast to reports that online technologies are predominantly used as a remedial tool and that innovative approaches to technology use are often limited to the pedagogical activities of a small minority of practitioners" (2019c).
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In the same article, Hauck comments on the limitations of the project, which appears to have enhanced the teacher candidates' comfort with technology but done little to increase their grasp of critical digital literacies. She writes that
"criticality as expressed in the data is limited to critical awareness of tool affordances and potential pedagogical tool use. What is missing though, is the critical dimension of digital literacy as reflected in awareness of the socio-cultural contexts of technology use beyond education systems."
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She concludes that "enhanced critical consciousness and agency" in relation to technology use
"has yet to become an acknowledged benefit of VE [virtual exchange] – despite the fact that it offers an ideal setting to foster the critical dimension of digital literacy in twenty-first-century transnational graduates. As we have seen, the practice of VE can enhance digital skills through its experiential approach. Yet, to instil and nurture criticality in relation to technology use in participants, task design that triggers guided reflection on tools and interactions and on the wider sociopolitical context of an exchange is needed" (2019c).
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Increasingly, Hauck and other scholars in the field (for example, O'Dowd, 2019; Helm, 2018a; Helm & Acconcia, 2019) make the case for virtual exchanges that go beyond the telecollaboration model and are closer to the ones being used, and constantly refined, in the Soliya Connect and Erasmus+ Virtual Exchange initiatives. Those approaches invite participants to engage more profoundly with complexity, difference, self-knowledge, and criticality.
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Learn more about the EU-funded EVALUATE project in pre-service teacher education in this slideshow created by lead researcher Robert O'Dowd (4:01).
Image from the EVALUATE project final report shows teacher candidates taking part in a telecollaboration session (Baroni et al. 2019).
Above and below: The stages of the telecollaborative virtual exchanges that took place during the EVALUATE project, as described in its final report (Baroni et al., 2019).