The Wiley Handbook of Collaborative Online Learning and Global Engagement

7 Seeing the World Through the Eyes of Others: Learning Perspective-Taking Through Storytelling

Emilienne Idorenyin Akpan¹ and Joshua Searle-White²

¹ American University of Nigeria

² Allegheny College, USA

Being able to see the world the way others see it is a core life skill. “Perspective-taking” is a skill has been linked to reduced bias and stereotyping (Galinsky and Moskowitz, 2000), increased creativity (Grant and Berry, 2011), and even success in business negotiations (Galinsky et al., 2008). Learning perspective-taking is also a feature of much of a liberal arts curriculum, as many disciplines, such as history, economics, psychology, foreign language, theater, rhetoric, among others, ask students to imagine what people in a different time, place, culture, or life situation might see, think, or feel when experiencing the world.

Our global course connection involved joining a first year storytelling course at Allegheny College (henceforth AC), in Meadville, Pennsylvania, in the USA, with a first year composition course at the American University of Nigeria (henceforth AUN), in Yola, Nigeria. We used perspective-taking to help our students develop their writing and speaking skills because we believed that having a real (rather than hypothetical) audience would help them develop clearer and more thoughtful English language skills. Although our two courses retained their distinct identities, we designed the syllabi so that our students would connect with their international ...