The Wiley Handbook of Collaborative Online Learning and Global Engagement

4 Yearning Toward Community: Gaining Global Awareness Through Conversations on Literature

Patricia Bloem

Grand Valley State University, USA

It takes an enormous act of imagination to grasp a world that is pluralist, relativist, perspectival and, at once, yearning toward community. There is no chart for this. We are living through new beginnings. We require the imagination to “light the slow fuse of possibility.”

Maxine Greene, quoted in Ayers (1995, p. 322).

As someone who has been involved in both study-abroad education and in virtual exchange projects for many years, I have been alarmed to see international education numbers diminish, for both outgoing and incoming students. The IIE has reported national increases (Redden, 2019), estimating that 10.9% of all undergraduates and 16% of all students enrolled in baccalaureate programs study abroad at some point during their degree program. But those numbers are still lower than optimal, and, given the COVID pandemic, have diminished. It distresses me that most of this cohort of American college students has lost their opportunity to study abroad during their college years, and that they are not having one-on-one interactions with international peers. Many of my students will be teachers, and I am aware that they have little knowledge of educational systems or literary traditions other than their own. I worry that as American students stop traveling abroad and are no longer meeting international students on campus, their world ...