Global Classrooms

In the past year, UC Santa Cruz students have worked on meaningful projects in their courses with students in Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia — without visas, currency exchange, or jet lag. This amazing feat was accomplished by a cohort of instructor pairs from UC Santa Cruz and partner institutions abroad who participated in Global Classrooms, a professional development and course design program focused on virtual exchange.

Virtual exchange is not new — some forms of it predate the Internet — but it didn’t come into its own until 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic made travel difficult. In the fall of 2020, the Division of Global Engagement launched the Global Classrooms initiative, which provided faculty with opportunities for training in virtual exchange (from institutions with large virtual exchange programs) and assistance with forming partnerships with faculty at institutions abroad. In 2022, the Teaching & Learning Center’s Jessie Dubreuil and Aaron Zachmeier developed a professional development program tailored to the needs of UC Santa Cruz faculty and their partners. The program promotes the Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) approach to virtual exchange, which emphasizes collaboration between faculty and student groups. The first cohort that participated in the program has now taught their virtual exchange courses and shared their thoughts with the TLC.

The Sociology Department’s Hiroshi Fukurai worked with longtime friend Denis Halis from Universidade Estácio de Sá in Rio de Janeiro (UNESA), Brazil, to design a course that brought together undergraduate students from Santa Cruz with law school students at UNESA to produce original research papers on environmental justice topics. Both Fukurai and Halis commented on the quality of communication between their two groups of students. Halis noted the effort UC Santa Cruz students made with UNESA students, not all of whom were confident in English, which was used as the lingua franca for the exchange. “They really tried to understand and make themselves understood,” Halis said. Instead of just speaking out, they really tried to be understood, and in the end, there was true and meaningful mutual learning as they had distinct backgrounds and experiences.”

Writing instructor Tiffany Wong and her partner Lourdes Pérez Cesari from Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Hidalgo in Pachuca, Mexico, paired writing and theater students, who wrote, performed, and recorded short plays in the style of commedia dell’arte. Pérez Cesari and Wong were pleased to see that their students were able to negotiate differences in culture and communication in productive ways. “We had amazing groups of students working with their creativity, using technology in a fun way,” Pérez Cesari said. “They found ways to communicate even when it was hard because they didn’t speak the same language, they found ways to work together. Some even worked a sketch around a mistake they made about meat loaf (which in Spanish is pastel de carne), calling it “meat cake” and making a bit about it.” 

And while the process is often more important than the product in collaborative student work, Wong and Pérez Cesari’s students produced excellent work. “What really surprised me at the end,” Wong said, “was how well their final videos turned out: how dedicated my students were to understanding character and plot development, and how well Lourdes’ students were at working with and helping my students become more embodied writers.”

Finally, Carolina Gonzalez Riaño worked with a group of instructors at Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas in Bogota, Colombia (Luisa Fernanda Vargaz Téllez, José Assad Cuellar, and César Luis Morales Figueroa), to design a series of collaborative activities focused on monsters in society for Spanish-speaking first-year students in Santa Cruz and performing arts students in Bogota. “I was surprised by the possibilities for motivation and flexibility in the evaluation processes, because we had different levels, different types of undergraduate students, different interests, and, to top it all, different cultures,” Vargaz Téllez said. “In spite of everything, including institutional difficulties at Universidad Distrital (the university’s email system was hacked near the beginning of the term), I think we achieved a good result.”

In each Global Classrooms course, students gained invaluable experience collaborating with their peers at partner institutions, negotiating, communicating, and leveraging their differences. 

At this writing, a new faculty cohort has begun to design the next set of Global Classrooms courses, which will give UC Santa Cruz students the opportunity to work with students from Universidade Federal Fluminense in Niterói, Brazil, Université de Douala in Douala, Cameroon, Universidad Catolica in Santiago, Chile, and UNESA in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The Division of Global Engagement and the TLC have meanwhile opened the call to faculty to identify the next cohort to develop Global Classrooms, with training set to begin in fall 2024.