(Re)formulating inclusionary learning design
Students are often framed as mere recipients of knowledge transfer (Freire, 1970), with staff and faculty at higher education institutions (HEIs) being solely responsible for conceptualizing and facilitating educational offerings (Boughey & McKenna, 2021). In virtual exchange environments, these existing exclusionary pedagogical and relational inequities can be further entrenched (Behari-Leak, 2020). While this pattern has a long history within HEIs across the world, the uni-directional nature of pedagogical formation and knowledge transfer has been pronounced with the burgeoning of such virtual offerings in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, as shown through a range of case studies engaged by Czerniewicz et al. (2020).
In late 2020 the authors of this paper, from various international HEIs, hosted a virtual exchange offering which brought students from the University of Toronto Scarborough (Canada) and Stellenbosch University (South Africa) together to engage around the theme of food security. Spurred on by positive feedback from the participants, we hosted a follow-up collaborative online feedback session in which students and facilitators from each institution provided feedback on the offering. In this forum, students put forward a range of suggestions, spanning from questions around the length of engagement to the potential of collaborative work between students from these two locations; this feedback became the bedrock on which the Global Classroom for Democracy Innovation (GCDI) was developed.
The GCDI comprises an intensive five-week process where students are split into globally diverse teams in which they are guided through the framework of design thinking (Constanza-Chock, 2020) to produce a project under a common theme. The themes covered in subsequent iterations of the GCDI have been climate change, sustainability, and democracy. While expecting students to co-design projects throughout this course, as the organizers of the broader project, we have been continually engaged in a process of prototyping and reformulating the project’s parameters.
In March 2021 we hosted our first cohort of students which, after engaging and being prompted by a guest speaker from the international non-governmental organization (NGO) 350.org, went through the ‘double diamond’ process of design thinking. Importantly, a student who joined as a participant in the initial pilot event was integrated into the coordinating team at this point. While their insights became essential in the development of the project as a whole, it also prompted the development of student facilitator roles, which would oversee and manage the progress made by each group over the duration of the project.
Moving toward inclusive, co-created pedagogy
An inescapable element of internationally connected virtual exchanges is the prevalence of multiple layers of power dynamics. In the conceptualisation of the GCDI, we remained cognizant of the ubiquity of extractive virtual exchanges and international projects (Boughey & McKenna, 2021; Hoon et al., 2022; Behari-Leak, 2020). Students from the Global South are disproportionately affected by this. Nested within this entrenchment of international power dynamics is the positioning of students as solely recipients of knowledge transfer.
The GCDI coordinating committee is accordingly composed of both academic staff and students from a range of international HEIs, along with critical pedagogy practitioners and partners from the Vancouver Design Nerds (VDN), a Vancouver-based organization working on design thinking in various forms and locales. The thematic framing of the various iterations of the GCDI has a strong connection with the curricular content taught at all partner institutions. However, critically reformulating the nature and expectations of knowledge transfer by including students in the formulation and implementation, in both the curricular and co-curricular spaces through the GCDI, we have aimed to intentionally reposition the role of students.
Baran & Correia (2009), writing even before COVID-19 had significantly impacted the prevalence of online learning spaces, considered the possibility of utilizing student-led facilitation as a tool to overcome “instructor-dominated facilitation” (Baran & Correia, 2009, p. 340). We found, as Baran and Correia rightly note, that leveraging student-led facilitation can significantly alter the pedagogical milieu. During each five-week iteration, there would be a weekly engagement where all students would join a two-hour session hosted on Zoom. In these sessions general framing and a short presentation on a certain element of the design process were covered by a member of the coordinating committee, after which students split up into their groups, with a student-facilitator, to practically engage with content in relation to their own project.
At the end of each five-week iteration, students were expected to prepare a short presentation on the project/intervention that they had developed. As a coordinating team, we remained hopeful that the students would have taken the prompts provided throughout the design process to creatively and critically develop a project. Coordinator and facilitator feedback sessions were largely underlined by overwhelming satisfaction in how students had first developed interesting and practical projects, and also by the positive impact that student facilitators had had on their peers’ work. In fact, by using student facilitators we illustrated that peer facilitation can be productively linked with the design thinking process, leading to critical and inclusive engagement between students (Baran & Correira, 2009).
Popularizing inclusive and co-created pedagogy
While the feedback from the two iterations of the GCDI presented in 2022 has been overwhelmingly positive from both qualitative and quantitative data received from students, questions still remain. Firstly, we have concluded that inclusion in virtual exchanges cannot be superficially addressed. A range of power dynamics must be intentionally addressed through the design of the educational offering. In line with this, we have intentionally positioned our work around the concept of ‘design justice’ (Constanza-Chock, 2020), by ensuring that educational institution or degree program did not influence a student’s chance of being employed as a student facilitator. By having student facilitators from a range of backgrounds, we argue that the GCDI has initiated the process of developing an inclusive educational offering.
Furthermore, a discernible shift has occurred in the field of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL), which critically focuses on the expectations and needs of students in the contemporary moment. By positioning students as co-creators of virtual exchanges, and thus democratizing the design process of both the larger offering as well as students’ projects (Manzini, 2015), a more engaging and inclusive offering can be developed; the parameters around what exactly this looks like, and the processes needed to bring it to fruition, remain contested.
In conclusion, the various iterations of the GCDI indicate that virtual exchanges, especially those with global ties, are both sites of possibility for the entrenchment of power dynamics, as well as inclusive and engaging pedagogy. While we have become increasingly aware of this dynamic within the GCDI project, and in that more capable of being able to address and navigate these issues, forming an educational offering with these concerns in focus initiates more inclusive and engaging virtual exchanges.
References:
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Behari-Leak, K. (2020). Towards a borderless, decolonized, socially just, and Inclusive
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