On Critical Virtual Exchange

Dr Mirjam Hauck hails from the School of Languages and Applied Linguistics at the Open University in the UK. She is a founding member of UNICollaboration and has been a passionate and dedicated scholar in the field of VE for the past 25 years. 

For the last 4-5 years, her work has concentrated on framing and theorising Critical Virtual Exchange CVE).

Why have you chosen to focus on researching and analysing Critical Virtual Exchange?

Because, in my experience, the critical perspectives in terms of critical resistance, remain under-explored in Virtual Exchange. That’s my main motivation. Also, as I’m entering what is likely to be the last decade of my professional life, I decided I only want to be involved in work that is socio-politically relevant. Critical VE, that is VE through the social justice and inclusion lens fits my criteria. 

To explain further: it’s widely recognised that VE practices are often still electives in HE curricula. This means they are only available to a limited number of students. Therefore, it’s true to say that VE as an integral part of Internationalisation at Home (IaH) is not inherently inclusive. It remains prone to western hegemonies and power imbalances among participants – as all forms of online learning and hybrid education are. 

How does CVE aim to address this?

First of all, I want to say that I’m not the first academic to come up with this concept. Colleagues from the Stevens Initiative, in particular Kastler and Lewis (see page 17 in this document) began to look at VE through the equality, diversity and inclusion lens for the first time.

Critical virtual exchange explicitly sets out to address social justice and inclusion both at individual and institutional levels. It does this as it requires more equitable and inclusive student experiences. There are certain defining elements that make a VE a CVE.

These include for example: the use of low bandwidth technology, the inclusion of under-represented students, usually students from low socio-economic backgrounds. Also essential to a CVE is the alignment of student exchange project work with the UN SDGs. Where possible, the students’ resulting project work should enable them to collaborate with local charities, green business, NGOs, etc. as part of their exchange project work.

And let’s not forget the systematic inclusion of translanguaging approaches. This does not mean code switching, I hasten to add. This means students use all available languages in the exchange, as well as all other means and modes of communicating. These are all elements that should be brought into a VE to make it a true CVE.

(Note: While code-switching recognises the boundaries between named languages and a speaker switches from one language to another, translanguaging highlights an individual’s linguistic repertoire that contains all language elements that an individual knows).

Can you give us a concrete example?

My favourite one I’ve come across is a great example of a CVE and speaks to most of the criteria I’ve mentioned. During its first iteration, it was called ‘Reading the City’ and during its 2nd iteration, it was called ‘Making your city sustainable’. 

There were three partners as educators from Sweden, Argentina and Poland whose students worked together to critically explore their respective different urban environments through the lens of UN SDG number 11 (making your city safe, inclusive, resilient and sustainable).

It was a 7-week-long collaboration. The participants included tourism students from Poland, multimodal students from Argentina, and future English teachers from Sweden. There were 10 cross-cultural teams and they used English as the lingua franca. The Swedish educator, Malin Glimäng says the focus was on content and communication and less on language acquisition. The students were encouraged to use multimodal and multilingual resources during the exchange project. 

(Note: Multimodal learning suggests that when a number of our senses – visual, auditory, kinaesthetic – are being engaged during learning, we understand and remember more. By combining these modes, learners experience learning in a variety of ways to create a diverse learning style).

What did they do?

First of all, the students familiarised themselves with all the online tools before starting the project work proper. Then, they explored the potentials of multimodal-meaning-making. They did this by sharing and critically analysing popular and official tourist websites of their respective cities. The students focused on the content of these websites, on the stories and on the values they promoted. 

Then they looked at how their cities were represented in aesthetic texts including literature, poetry and music. They identified controversial issues, like crime, poverty, segregation, prejudice, etc. Then, in their cross-cultural teams, they designed their own multimodal city texts and websites based on the critical theme they had chosen. 

In the second iteration, (focusing on how to make your city sustainable), there was more emphasis on critical  agency and critical digital citizenship. But again they explicitly aligned the exchange with UN SDG number 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities. The mission statement states: Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.

What advice would you give to educators when designing VE to make it more CVE?

I would urge them to seek out the socio-political challenges in their respective local contexts. Ask yourself where the students can make a meaningful impact in the local community by extending the project outside of the walls of their institutions. Imagine how the participants could contribute to solving real-world problems.

I’m always encouraging teachers (and students for that matter) to move outside their comfort zones…..outside of food, fashion, folklore, festival topics…..as these are the first entry points for a VE. But we can go beyond this.

In fact, it’s true to say that more and more educators are cottoning on to the importance of the ‘criticality’ in what we do. CVE gives us the unique opportunity to confront some of the challenges we are facing on a daily basis including global conflicts.

But this takes us into the realm of the issue of conflict and peace education. There is much to say about this, so watch this space for a future post as Mirjam continues to explore peace education as a part of CVE.