Eithne Knappitsch – a woman with many hats.
Eithne’s main position is as professor of Intercultural Management in the Business School at Carinthia University of Applied Sciences. She’s been working there since 2008. The university is situated in the southern part of Austria and very close to the border with Italy and Slovenia.
Originally from the very north of Ireland, at the border with Northern Ireland, she says she instinctively picks up the ‘liminal spaces in between’!
“As well as being a professor of intercultural management, I’m a co-founder of the Global Case Study Challenge. This is basically a large-scale virtual exchange that I’ve been collaborating on for nine years with Barbara Covarrubias-Venegas and Anna Zinenko.
It’s developed into a yearly virtual exchange that we do globally and provide additional training for educators, facilitators of virtual exchange and internationalisation officers.
Eithne is working on several capacity building projects with Armenian and Ukrainian universities too! Oh and she’s on the board of IVEC!
UNICollaboration: Your mission says you help organisations build relational intelligence that turns collaboration into results. We talk a lot about emotional intelligence, and we hear less about relational intelligence. Can you outline what the difference is?
Eithne Knappitsch: “Working in the field of intercultural communication and intercultural dynamics, we hear a lot about emotional intelligence and things like empathy and contextual intelligence. And very often we see them as the responsibility also of the individual. But, we don’t often talk about it from an organisational perspective.
Over the last 20 years, doing this type of virtual work, I’ve been exploring the idea of individual responsibilities around emotional intelligence and the impact that this can have at the organisational level. So I’ve expanded this idea to combine emotional intelligence, also collaboration intelligence, and contextual intelligence.
I see relational intelligence as part of the responsibility of organisations at the level of coordinating spaces for the relationships that happen. So, of course, we have our own individual relational intelligence as well, but, I also see it as something specifically, that can be organised, designed for, and coordinated by organisations.”
UNICollaboration: Over the years, how has the way you use Virtual Exchange and its related pedagogy evolved?
Eithne Knappitsch: Well, when we started working with the Global Case Study Challenge, which was really the first virtual exchange that I was involved in, we didn’t really have a name for it. And initially it started out of an intention to design intercultural learning that was experience based and that was real world related with a group of more or less homogenous students in a regional location.
Previously I had been involved with the Society for Intercultural Education Training and Research. And we realised with a number of people who were practitioners, educators, trainers, that we were missing a link if we were simply engaging in intercultural communication theories and trying to do practical trainings with more or less homogenous groups. We began recognising the diversity everywhere, even with the same language, and the same context groups.
And it was only later I identified and became familiar with the whole world of COIL and virtual exchange. So we sort of started doing it without realising that there was a specific pedagogy.
Initially, it was very much associated with linguistics, language learning, tele-collaboration. But now that’s not the case. It’s really branched out to include much more diverse forms of learning and engagement.
You can bring together this trans-disciplinary or interdisciplinary approach and discover it can be relevant in all cases. I know of some wonderful virtual exchanges where completely different disciplines have come together.
I see that as a major development and maybe also from my particular perspective, working at a European University of Applied Sciences and being involved in a European alliance there.
Virtual exchange a core pedagogy for alliances that are doing this, whether they’re doing research or other. I think that the pedagogy itself lends itself brilliantly as a foundational pedagogy for alliances.”
UNICollaboration: Yes, I wanted to move on to alliances, actually. And I’m just wondering, is this pedagogy being more accepted now? Because sometimes I know academics have come up against a bit of resistance in adopting it. What are you finding in alliances now?
Eithne Knappitsch: “I actually think it’s not named as such, so it’s not recognised. And I think in a lot of the work that takes place at the decision level in alliances, it remains unrecognised.
New alliance offices are not always conscious about the types of pedagogy that are being used. I know that I was involved in designing some of the pedagogical programmes of the Alliance that I’m involved in, and the core suggestions coming from me at least, were based on my experience with virtual exchange/COIL. So I think it’s under-recognised.
Northern American universities will have, or at least had in the past, departments and individuals responsible for promoting, for the design and for supporting everybody involved.
And I think it’s not the same in a European context.”
UNICollaboration: Before I let you go, I’ve spoken in a couple of my other interviews with, for example, Dr. Miriam Hauck, Simone Hackett, Mark Dawson, and John Rubin about AI and virtual exchange, and it’s nice to get some different perspectives. Some think AI will destroy virtual exchange. What’s your take, just as a final few words, on where we’re going with AI within the context of virtual exchange?
Eithne Knappitsch: Well, I take a very positive and optimistic approach to it, so I should maybe mention that first. I think we have the same debates across all universities in a similar way. The virtual exchange that I’ve been working on, the Global Case Study Challenge has one pillar designed around digital collaboration.
As soon as we started introducing AI, we also started introducing the idea of what that meant for our students across the globe who are collaborating. And we very intentionally then embedded it into the design of the programme. It means that we have our students taking a conscious and a critical approach to how they’re using it because from different contexts we have different associations.
There are issues with trust, responsibility and ethics. But in other contexts, we have great awareness about how to use it as an additional tool in a supporting very ethical and intentional way. So we try to also get students and their teams to have a conversation about and to actually agree and decide on how they’re using it and how it supports the work within the virtual exchange that we’re running.
And in addition to that, I do some collaboration with a colleague who is a digital business professor, and we’ve been writing a little bit and researching on how AI can also impact on relational dynamics within virtual teams.
This is an area that I’m also interested in exploring more because, depending on how we use it, it can support multilingual, multicultural contexts if we use it very critically. That means designing it to approach conversations from a constructive intercultural perspective where we can actually design our AI support tools to really help our teams to think about how they can improve the relational dynamics between them. I think there’s a huge opportunity for that.
There are many ways that it can support the learning. It can support the multilingual aspects – maybe helping balance out some of those power dynamics a little bit that emerge through, language use or whatever the dominant language of the virtual exchange is.
We can use it to be aware ethically of how we’re working together. It can add a new dimension to virtual exchange if, for example, we have virtual exchanges that use special projects or agents. This is something that we tried to set up last year for the last edition of our virtual exchange.
So, I think there’s lots of ways to see it, but I’m actually positive about it, and interested in it, very curious.”