PLENARY - Place-based Intercultural Learning in the Virtual Era: Politics and Possibilities
Presentation Summary
The coronavirus pandemic has sparked a reimagining of higher education for students and faculty alike worldwide. This uncomfortable moment, while taking much away from us, offers an opportunity to pause and ask: what lessons can the pandemic teach us about future study abroad and intercultural programming? The current “virtual turn” in education – from virtual classrooms to virtual museum exhibits – creates space for us to consider innovative ways in which we can meaningfully engage students with people and places abroad through virtual channels. Innovation may take the form of enhancing existing programming through digital tools or forging fresh online collaborations with faculty from other universities (e.g. bulking up pre-departure curricula for study abroad; engaging students in intercultural sharing through collaborative courses or assignments). Considering that study abroad is inaccessible to many students on account of financial or time constraints, virtual culture contact may be one way to facilitate meaningful dialogue between students from diverse backgrounds.
While the possibilities may be virtually endless, it is critical to acknowledge that intercultural experiences are not inherently educational. Contact with novel places, peoples, and cultures—including virtual contact—is always a mediated encounter. Even before an initial interaction, places and cultures exist in our minds as representations, which are typically socially constructed. This presentation explores the politics and possibilities of virtual intercultural experiences while highlighting the importance of creating programming that is both socially- and culturally-conscious. Drawing from the philosophy of place-based education, pedagogies that are responsive to particular attributes of a place are presented as a way to: increase student self-awareness, promote intercultural sharing, and ultimately deconstruct representations of cultural “others.” The presentation concludes with a reflection on how place-based intercultural learning could function as a tool to increase civic engagement and cultivate student advocates of social change.
Primary Presenter
Jennifer Pipitone, College of Mount Saint Vincent in New York City
State (if in the U.S.)
New York
Country
USA
Professional Biography
Dr. Jennifer M. Pipitone is Assistant Professor of Psychology and Director of Professional Learning at the College of Mount Saint Vincent in New York City, and serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Experiential Education. As an environmental psychologist, Jennifer directs her energies toward addressing social issues and collective problems that arise from living in an increasingly diverse society. Jennifer’s primary research responds to problematic trends in study abroad that reproduce hierarchies of power and colonialism, perpetuate views of homogeneous cultural “others,” and privilege tourism over education. She is particularly interested in how place-based experiential pedagogies can contribute to the development of more culturally-sensitive and socially-conscious study abroad programs. Expanding her work into urban multicultural settings, Jennifer’s second line of research addresses socio-spatial inequalities that result in restricted mobility for, and exclusion of, marginalized populations; she is currently exploring social (in)equity in urban greenspaces.