Developing a Networked Space to Support Global Collaboration Between Secondary School Writers

• In Event: Multiliteracies in Educational Global Collaborations: Educators and Students Connecting and Collaborating Cross-Culturally

Abstract

Purpose
This paper explores how adolescents collaborate online with people they do not know offline - an issue of vital importance as educational opportunities increasingly require students to use digital tools to connect/share via online platforms. Despite a proliferation of communication technologies, it remains profoundly difficult to initiate, sustain, and nurture virtual conversations and connections across cultures (Sorrells, 2013). This paper examines how students communicated with unfamiliar others using multilingual, multimodal, and multiliteracies (New London Group, 1996) resources, particularly youth-created videos and images that crossed linguistic divides.

Theoretical Framing
One challenge of ‘telecollaboration’ (Ware, 2018) involves learning to listen to, learn with, and create alongside one another - in other words, to act as cosmopolitan intellectuals (Campano & Ghiso, 2011). To understand how young people connected to one another online, this study is framed in critical cosmopolitanism (e.g., Author, 2019; Hawkins, 2018), which understands cross-cultural connection not as essentializing global togetherness but as a deliberate reckoning with how systems of power and privilege shape collaboration.

Methods/Data
This paper focuses on a 12-week period of interaction during an ongoing, design-based research study (Collins et al., 2004). We worked with 126 adolescents and 3 teachers from Italy, India, and the U.S. in the context of an educator-facilitated social network. Data included semi-structured interviews, video and audio recordings of select classroom activities, field notes and reflective memos, curriculum documents, surveys, student artifacts, and network analytics from the online platform. Analysis of data were qualitative in nature (Miles, Huberman, & Saldaña, 2014), including rounds of emergent, pattern, and theoretical coding using critical cosmopolitanism (Author, 2019). We coded for different forms of collaboration: (1) Outreach; (2) Exchange; 3) Borrowing; and (4) Co-creation.

Findings
We found that collaboration across different countries/sites was difficult to initiate and sustain. When collaboration across sites occurred, it began with small forms of outreach and exchange of information. We position these practices as early forms of collaboration, finding them to be critical ways participants developed relationships allowing them to know one another – what Hull and Stornaiuolo (2014), echoing Silverstone (2007), identify as ‘proper distance.’ In this community, participants became ‘closer’ (i.e. developed proper distance) by learning about one another through media, images and videos curated to cross linguistic and cultural divides over time.

Significance
While many studies examine the affordances of tools used to collaborate, this study reinforces the human aspects of collaboration – that trust, community, and proper distance are forged over time and are necessary to sustain meaningful collaborative work. One implication for educators involves designing collaborative opportunities that foster relationship-building and foreground multiple modes, languages, and literacies. This kind of relational work to ‘cover the distance’ across differences in language, culture, belief, and experience is necessary in telecollaboration – we cannot assume technology will connect people or that youth will skip immediately to sharing vulnerable stories or co-constructing artifacts with unknown others. This study highlights the conference theme by recognizing stakeholders’ histories and varying perspectives as vital for ‘connecting and collaborating’ in educational partnership.

Authors

• Amy Stornaiuolo, University of Pennsylvania

• Matthew Hall, The College of New Jersey