Addressing empathy in intercultural virtual exchange: a preliminary framework

Empathy is widely perceived and understood as an unquestioned component of Intercultural Competence (IC). The authors see the ability to empathise with others and to see their point of view as an important condition for developing an ethnorelative viewpoint, and therefore consider it important to incorporate activities into the intercultural communication curriculum that addresses the affective side of IC (Calloway-Thomas, Arasaratnam-Smith, & Deardorff, 2017; Guntersdorfer & Golubeva, 2018). In their paper, the authors discuss the importance of meta-cognitive tasks by creating opportunities for students where they can describe, share, and evaluate emotions. Based on the recommendations made by O’Dowd (2016), Byram, Golubeva, Hui, and Wagner (2017) about designing and implementing virtual exchanges (VEs), the authors present a preliminary framework, i.e. a sequence of self-reflective meta-analysis tasks that they developed for the intercultural VE between students at Ludwig-Maximilians University (LMU) in Germany and their peers at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) in the United States. This framework can be adapted to a variety of online teaching contexts.

UniCollaboration plenary session: virtual learning goes to camp – online pedagogies in contexts of emergency and crisis

Just by way of introduction, here are some of the far flung criteria we have to consider when we go to an emergency setting when trying to figure out how we can bring the university to a camp. A lot of people are going hungry where we work, and providing meals and transport in refugee camps so people can attend class is very much a part of what we need to think about. Equally important is to figure out how to get women into a classroom. Designing and locating a classroom in a vast refugee camp and close to where people fetch water might seem very strange to any university in our regular setting, but to us it is one of the variables that we consider. Fetching water is a woman’s job and if women have to fetch water for five or six hours a day and your classroom is not near a water hub then they are not going to come. So, what I would like to do today is to help you visualise where we work. It is very difficult to imagine if you have never been out there. That is why it is useful to have some visual impressions. What does it look like, what does it mean to live in a refugee camp? Is it as bad as they say or is it as wonderful as they say?

Introduction

The conference concluding the EVALUATE project took place in September 2019 at the University of León in Spain. A number of colleagues answered our call for submissions to the conference proceedings. The articles you find in this volume provide a window into the multifaceted contributions not only to the conference, but to the field of telecollaboration and VE at large. We hope you enjoy finding out about the many different ways in which our colleagues engage with this innovative pedagogical approach that combines the deep impact of intercultural dialogue and exchange with the broad reach of digital technology.

Erasmus virtual exchange as an authentic learner experience

This small-scale study draws on a higher education context where French-speaking students, in situ at Bordeaux University, participated in the Sharing Perspectives Foundation’s flagship Erasmus+ Virtual Exchange (E+VE) program (2018-2019). French-speaking students interacted in English on the topic of Newcomers and Nationalism via weekly webinars with non-native English-speaking students from other participating universities in Europe and the Southern Mediterranean region. Authenticity is a complex concept involving the degree of implication and meaning speakers give to their interactions (Gilmore, 2007; Pinner, 2016; Widdowson, 2003). The study therefore addresses the question of how participant feedback can help us to assess E+VE in terms of authenticity. The methods used to investigate this research question were the qualitative analysis of the French students’ reflective journals, questionnaires, and interviews. The results show that E+VE is conducive to authentic learner experiences. This study has also enabled a definition of ‘authenticity’ as a transformative language learner experience in virtual exchange.

Virtual exchange in teacher education: is there an impact in teacher practice?

This text presents the results of surveys and interviews of Former Students (FSs) who have taken part in a teacher education course that began in 2004 (still on-going) and that includes Virtual Exchange (VE). The study aimed to look at the impact of two teacher education courses, imparted collaboratively between geographically-distanced universities for over a decade. The course design aims to introduce VE, both theoretically and empirically, as an approach to foreign language teaching in primary and secondary schools. The data are drawn from an online survey as well as in-depth interviews with FSs enrolled in the course between 2004 and 2015. The findings indicate that a significantly high percentage of the FSs who had been exposed to VE had been involved in or intended to implement VE in their own teaching and that the course had provided them with the knowledge and confidence to do so.

UniCollaboration plenary session: teaching across cultures, reaching across generations – virtual exchange and teacher education

When Robert O’Dowd asked me to do this talk, these are the three things I told him I would do, and here they are. I want to talk about how telecollaboration and virtual exchange has offered us this really creative space to animate as educators over the last 20 or 30 years. Because the focus is on teacher education and because over the last ten years my focus has been on teacher education, I want to talk about some of the key takeaways that we can have and say that these are the things that make good practice in virtual exchanges. Finally, I will bring along a new project that I am working on that I hope will tie together some of the themes that we are looking forward to in the future. Having been here for the last two and a half days, I realise many of you are thinking about the same types of themes.

Developing global citizenship through real-world tasks – a virtual exchange between North American university students and Italian upper-secondary school students

This paper concerns a virtual exchange project between the University of Virginia (UVa), United States, and an upper-secondary school in Pavia, Italy. Centred on the question of gender equality, the project has been designed to take place over three years (2018–2021) with a direct reference to Robert O’Dowd’s transnational model of virtual exchange for global citizenship education, proposed in 2018. As an integrated part of the language learning curriculum, the project creates a virtual space which parallels the space-time of traditional class tuition, and which students can inhabit with a significant degree of autonomy. More specifically, this paper gives an account of how students, through real-world tasks, could develop global citizenship.

Developing an online course on virtual exchange for teachers: a reflection on the design and implementation

Virtual Exchanges (VEs) are flourishing yet there are still few courses in higher education that offer in-service teachers the fundamental theoretical and practical knowledge necessary to organize and conduct a telecollaborative project in their own educational settings. This paper aims to provide a resource to teacher educators and course designers who seek to design a course on VEs in higher or post-secondary education. Through reflective practice (Bolton, 2018) and adhering to the principles of educational design research (McKenney & Reeves, 2012), the process of design and development of an online master’s course for language teachers is described. The article begins by describing the context and discussing the underlying rationale and principal course aims and learning outcomes, and the syllabus and assessment tasks are then reviewed. Course evaluation throughout the years is briefly reported as well as other outcomes. The results are positive overall both in terms of how students evaluated the course and the competences they acquired, although a couple of limitations are recognized. The study concludes with a reflection on the process of course design and the challenges faced.

Fostering critical thinking and motivation through digital escape rooms: preliminary observations

This paper reports our preliminary observations of a pilot project carried out from February to April 2019 with a group of students learning Spanish at the University of Central Missouri and students learning English at the University of León. The project combines challenging escape room activities with intercultural and interlinguistic interaction in a virtual exchange. Students learned of the premise of the activity through a video that set the context in a dystopian future with an authoritarian dictator who had hidden and controlled access to knowledge. The contextual narrative also explained that a hacker was leaking information that the students could retrieve. Therefore, they needed to collaborate with their partners in order to save the world by solving different types of enigmas that involved knowledge about geography, culture, and language. In addition to these problem-solving activities, they were also required to discuss cultural topics and comment on different habits, traditions, and stereotypes. This combination might enhance the students’ motivation, foster their communication skills, and help them develop critical thinking skills and learn more about each other’s language, country, and culture.

UniCollaboration plenary session

To speak about virtual exchange, I can give you some key words which we are going to elaborate for the next 45 minutes: 'terrorist attacks', 'Bataclan', and other such words. I can also speak about the teachers' views, the fact that teachers today need more motivation, social acknowledgement, and prestige. I also mean to speak about digital skills and the myths around them, starting with 'digital natives'; an expression we use so quickly that falls short of our expectations. Virtual exchange is also about mobility.