The language of diversity, equity, and inclusion has largely been promoted by and within United States-based institutions. As a result, these initiatives have not always focused on challenging power asymmetries related to the category of nation, including imperialism and linguistic domination. Virtual exchanges (VE), while far from perfect, can offer a chance for students and professors of various nationalities to work collaboratively towards more expansive visions of transnational solidarity. Drawing on our experiences facilitating two multi-sited, co-taught courses between universities in Argentina and the United States, this piece asserts that VE can promote equity and inclusion for instructors and students by 1) centering the voices of the Global South in the course material and 2) creating transnational collaborations through project-based assignments and co-teaching teams who work together across borders and often in multiple languages. VEs create a third space for students and professors to reflect about global issues such as racism and gender violence. The networks born of VE act inside and outside the classroom through practices of collective knowledge making, like this piece written by scholars from South America in collaboration with scholars in the US.
First, our VE promoted equity and inclusion through course syllabi that foregrounded the
perspectives of scholars and activists from the Global South. The class material contextualized and recognized human diversity while the assignments and discussions encouraged students to learn from each other. For instance, in one of our classes, Online and in the Streets: Feminist Protest and Activism in Latin America, we included materials on Black, Chicana, trans, and popular feminisms to provide a critique of “mainstream” Western White feminism that fails to account for non-White and LGBTQIA++ people. Teaching-learning spaces that center marginalized experiences not only expose students to new stories, but also frame experiences in the Americas as systemic and interconnected, rather than as unconnected or individualized anecdotes. Thus, VEs can be laboratories to test plural forms of education, respecting diversity and aiming for emancipatory practices.
This leads to our second point about the virtual classroom as a third, interstitial space: one in which cultures, languages, experiences, and histories converge. In this way VE can promote intercultural encounters that foster dialogue amongst students from diverse backgrounds. Transnational collaborations among students take the form of project-based assignments that encourage students to work in teams as they develop digital projects. A student from another VE course, Literature and Ideas in the Caribbean, reflected:
The experience of working one-on-one with other students becomes a matter of convergence and divergence […] The magic is that once I am aware this distance exists, and once I remember that in the tension between here and there I can meet those who seem to be far away, suddenly relationships become a little less complicated, and I can finally enjoy and take advantage of both likenesses and differences to grow, to better understand others, and ultimately, to become more like myself.
It is through these assignments that students like the one quoted above face the challenges of collective learning and enjoy the benefits of connecting with students from diverse backgrounds. This enables personal growth, a deeper understanding of others, and ultimately a greater sense of self.
For instructors VE also promotes transnational collaborations through co-teaching teams that work together across borders and languages. Inspired by popular pedagogies from South America, co-teaching means to collectively plan (in teams of two or more) lectures and discussions, advise students, and reflect about teaching and learning practices. As another example of the transnational dialogues that VE can create, Online and In the Streets organized Conversatorios (Talks) with activists and scholars from the Global South as part of the class. These conversations featured speakers whose subjectivities and experiences are too often overlooked in higher educational settings.
In sum, we conceptualize the VE as an opportunity to enhance diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in higher education by challenging students to consider nationality and language as categories of power (among other categories of race, class, gender, and sexuality that are more commonly theorized in DEI) . In our experiences VE prompted transnational networks where scholars and students collaborated by teaching in interinstitutional teams, creating visual projects that analyze race and gender from a comparative and transnational perspective, and expanding knowledge making outside the classroom. This opinion piece is part of that network that continues weaving webs of solidarity and collaborative intellectual work across national borders and languages.