Virtual Global Engagement: Peacebuilding within Teacher Education for a Digital World

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Teacher preparation through peace education and global engagement

Proposal

Scholars have noted that the idea of citizenship cannot be separated from the spaces in which it is developed and nurtured (Giroux & Bosio, 2021). This research considers the possibilities of developing collaborative online learning as a virtual space where global citizenship education (GCE) can be nurtured in both schools and universities as well as in the communities they serve. Facing both common global challenges and the cultural differences these challenges present in different areas of the word, while harnessing new technologies, virtual programming offers educators the role of engaged intellectual moderator between ways of knowing (Giroux & Bosio, 2021), both local and academic, in order to ethically address the pressing glocal challenges of our time (Bosio & Schattle, 2021).
Relevance to Theme and Problem Addressed
The pandemic revealed at once the tremendous capabilities of online learning for extending physical boundaries, yet at the same time, the enormous gaps in teacher training to effectively harness online learning potentials. Recognizing the potential within virtual education, international education programs have proliferated since 2020 with emphasis on global citizenship and peacebuilding.
While there has been rapid growth in Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL), Virtual Exchange (VE) and Virtual Internships (VI), educators also developed new ways of using online teaching and learning altogether. This rapid development has meant that innovations in the virtual space remain undertheorized and unexplored. Here we present applied research on an innovative model of virtual engagement that links preservice teachers in three national contexts in collaboration to teach children virtually in over 20 more cultures. This innovative model provides a multi-layered, multi-national, multi-lingual collaboration that brings preservice teachers, practicing teachers, school children, teachers, and communities together in dialogue from across the world. Multiple weekly synchronous sessions allow for real time discussion and engagement followed by ongoing asynchronous follow up. All participants collaborate across distance, cultures, languages, and even generations to engage the challenge of peacebuilding and other UN SDGs.
We use this model of virtual global engagement (VGE) to examine the affordances of online programming for bridging universities and communities globally in a shared boundary space of collaboration towards peacebuilding.
Virtual global engagement (VGE) combines elements of COIL , VE, and best practices in community engagement of higher education to extend cross cultural virtual exchange beyond the university classroom into host communities worldwide. VGE exemplifies glocal pluralities by allowing participants to be locally situated while simultaneously collaborating globally. Here, we use (program name) as our case study, a VGE project that links participants from 20 countries spanning the Global North and Global South. (Program name) partners preservice teachers in the diverse cultural contexts of Kenya, Taiwan, and the US as co-facilitators in collaboration with practicing teachers, community centers, libraries, and schools from 20 countries in an extracurricular club for students aged 10-14. (Program name) uses the virtual space to understand and discuss the complexities of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) from diverse perspectives and contexts with emphasis on Goal 16 of peacebuilding.
Methods
The value of global collaboration is also reflected in the research design, an inductive multi-sited case study-based approach. While much of the current research on virtual exchange is primarily based on small case designs, our approach brings researchers from three cultural contexts together in collaboration to generate propositions and themes across diverse settings. Our research explores this innovative program to generate propositions about strengths and weaknesses of the virtual space for nurturing GCE as well as themes of peacebuilding in contexts of global collaboration. Incorporating multiple perspectives of participants from diverse contexts, we utilize textual analysis, interviews with undergraduate program facilitators in Kenya, Taiwan, and the US, and survey data to inform the discussion of the potential for teacher education in this global virtual space.
Impact
Results will focus on the challenges and possibilities of using cross cultural virtual engagement to create space for GCE, and further, peace, to flourish, particularly when working across the Global North and the Global South. We will share outcomes that are evident in the perceptions of participants, particularly related to the theme of peacebuilding. While VGE frees participants from the limits of physical distance and increasingly reduces language barriers, challenges remain, from the practical level of time zones and the digital divide, to the theoretical, including the neoliberal confines on the imaginary (Bosio & Schattle, 2021). Implications for virtual programming aimed at peacebuilding are addressed within the broader scope of GCE for teacher education, and broader still, higher education.

Author

• Allison Witt, University of Illinois