“If they can’t study abroad, at least they can still do something.”
This all-too-common response to international virtual exchange (IVE) must be resisted, especially when it is invoked in conversations around diversity, equity, and inclusion in international education. The argument goes something like this: because IVE requires fewer financial resources and is an option for place-bound students, we should promote IVE as providing greater access to international education for first-generation and marginalized students facing obstacles to studying abroad.
This argument is dangerous not because it is false, but because it is only a partial truth. While IVE is more affordable and does not require travel, and while some international education is indeed better than none, statements such as these run a serious risk of relegating IVE to a secondary status of “study abroad lite.” Doing so misses the unique strengths of IVE, including for those marginalized by more traditional educational settings. More profoundly, viewing IVE as a substitute for study abroad provides political cover for institutions to reduce their efforts to make study abroad programs more accessible for first-generation and marginalized students, pushing them instead toward IVE. Urging marginalized students to participate in what is understood to be a second-rate international experience in the name of equity and inclusion should raise alarm bells.
Rather than viewing IVE as the lesser sibling of study abroad, we instead should see the two as distinct approaches to international education, with their own strengths and weaknesses, particularly those related to equity and inclusion. Likewise, we should take seriously the demands that a commitment to equity and inclusion places on both IVE and study abroad, rather than imagining IVE as an easier (read: less expensive, less time-consuming, less logistically complex, less training-intensive) mode of delivering an international experience to marginalized students. Consider the following three points:
Creating Equitable Virtual Spaces Through IVE
First, IVE (at least in its collaborative and reciprocal form) provides a more equitable space for students to meet across geographic and social boundaries than study abroad. By definition, study abroad requires one group of students to travel to another location, immediately casting participants in the role of either guest (those traveling) or host (those receiving the travelers). Interactions between guests and hosts can be incredibly rewarding and meaningful, but they can also be almost entirely superficial, or imbued with profound differentials in power and access. More often than not, it becomes more privileged students who travel, received by hosts who lack the resources to engage in similar travel. These dynamics are exacerbated when study abroad programs originating in the Global North travel to the Global South, with further racialized, gendered, and class-based differences thrown into high relief.
By contrast, IVE participants meet as equals, in a shared virtual space that is not already inhabited by one or the other group. In practice, of course, this dynamic is more complicated. Global and local inequities—with their own racialized, gendered, and economic histories—reappear in access to technology. Inequities also extend into vexing questions of language dominance, time, cultural capital, and geopolitical dynamics.
Preparing IVE Participants for Reciprocal Engagement Across Difference
These potential obstacles to full inclusion within IVE bring us to a second point: many who promote IVE in the name of equity and inclusion drastically underestimate the importance of preparing both students and instructors to deal with issues of identity and difference. Institutions accept that students studying abroad should receive at least some pre-departure training in navigating cultural differences ethically and respectfully. Yet IVE participants often receive very little preparation for their encounters with difference and diversity, and when they do, it lands almost entirely on the individual instructor to do so. This lack of institutional investment in preparation can have dire consequences, not only for relationships between IVE sites—especially between the Global South and the Global North—but also for marginalized students within the Global North.
At its best, IVE provides a context in which students usually marginalized within global centers of power find themselves empowered by their diverse language skills, backgrounds, and abilities to navigate cultural difference. At its worst, though, these same students are forced to negotiate intolerance and entitlement in how their peers engage with both them and their colleagues in the Global South. By imagining IVE to be a less-demanding version of study abroad, and thus paying insufficient attention to preparation around issues of equity and inclusion, educational institutions in the Global North can further alienate their own marginalized students along with their partners in the Global South.
Resisting the Temptation to Substitute DEI Efforts in Study Abroad With Expanded IVE
Finally, imagining IVE as the preferable option for marginalized students with limited resources or access to travel while leaving access to study abroad programs untouched fails to address the longstanding and persistent inequities within study abroad. As IVE gains traction, this could result in a two-track system, with marginalized students experiencing one type of international education—a lower-status, under-resourced form of IVE—and more privileged students continuing to travel the world through the gold standard, study abroad. We must avoid allowing IVE’s strengths—including its flexibility and affordability—to make us complacent or even exacerbate the very inequities we seek to address across international education.
Generating Greater Equity and Inclusion in Both IVE and Study Abroad
We have not yet reached the point of a two-track system. But if we intend to take issues of equity and inclusion seriously, we need to work tirelessly to make both IVE and study abroad more accessible, ethical, and reciprocal. A crucial first step would be to disentangle the ways in which we speak about and imagine both forms of international education, not as first and second choices, but rather as two distinct and intriguing approaches, each of which provides affordances that the other does not, and each of which demands distinct consideration of identity, equity, and access. If we manage to do this, the opportunities for marginalized students to thrive within both IVE and study abroad experiences will increase dramatically.