Co-Hosting and Collaborative Networked Teaching - Seminarium | A blog community created by Religious Studies and Seminary educators.

Collaborative networked teaching and learning has the potential to address a yawning gap between the strategic objectives for internationalization of higher education institutions and their actualization. In so many cases, sale institutions place “internationalization” in their vision, advice mission statements and strategic plans; it is usually the case that internationalization is either poorly realized or overlooked. The conventional thinking about internationalization focuses on student mobility abroad, garnering international students, founding niche programs, leadership centers or extension campuses abroad, sending delegations to establish MOUs and pitching MOOCs or distance programs online. To support these conventional strategies requires significant investments in staff, infrastructure, travel, administration, legal consultation, accreditation, and so on. These conventional strategies are rarely sustainable over the long-term, and they are incredibly difficult to scale-up.

The rationale for internationalization and these investments is driven by business interest. International programs, like adult or continuing education, are favorable to public and private institutions alike precisely because they bring in revenue streams that are not tied to local government obligations. Furthermore, and problematically from my point of view, these are more educational divestments than investments: their intentionally draw upon human and financial resources of “expanding markets,” usually from developing countries, and they rarely lead to substantive transfers of technology, governance, administration and knowledge. Despite their colonial intentions, few institutions find the realization of their internationalization efforts to be simple and efficient. Collaborative teaching and learning across regional and international networks, on the other hand, simply and efficiently accomplishes internationalization. This potential for success, however, is due to its freedom from revenue-based interests and clarion focus on the actual internationalizing of higher education. I wish to explain the practical and conceptual reason why this is the case.

A collaborative networked class session typically involves connecting two classrooms via the internet for a real-time learning experience. Here are some examples. On several occasions, class groups in Russia have met with students in Canada via videoconference to discuss their perspectives on a specific piece of literature, a philosophical text or a sociological case study. The specific modes of interaction varied, because the session plans were created by different the collaborating professors each time. Similar sessions have taken place for my Canadian classes with collaborating professors and their students in Nicaragua, Indonesia, Mozambique and India. These teachers and learners internationalized their curricula without any of the conventional internationalization strategies or scale of investments. Just because these events were incredibly affordable in comparison does not mean were not profound international learning experiences for all parties involved.

Jacques Derrida’s discussions of “hospitality” are instrumental in understanding why collaborative networked approaches actually work for the internationalization of higher education. Derrida’s concerns were in fact international when he wrote about hospitality: he wrote to address the difficulties of French society’s attempts to come to terms with its current circumstances and colonial legacy. Much like M.K. Gandhi before him, Derrida was acutely aware of how France conferred legal citizenship to peoples around the world and yet French society did not accord those people recognition or social access. To be of Algerian or Jewish descent, like Derrida, lead to experiences of systemic exclusion. In his later life, Derrida’s writings on hospitality sought to address the “foreigner question” right-wing xenophobia: Muslims and others who did not seem identifiably “French” in their speech, habit, dress, and so on. Derrida was also addressing his relationship to the Anglo-American philosophical community, who often balked and fetishized his work as somehow strange, unfamiliar or improper. And yet, he very definitely was the most important philosopher of the twentieth century. Doing deconstruction entails demonstrating how something foreign already and always lies within ideas and their concepts. The first point about Derrida is this: internationalization of education entails accepting the supposedly foreign into the familiar, and showing the foreignness within the supposedly familiar. Here is the second point: conventional internationalization strategies create and sustain boundaries between foreign and the familiar that are the core of their profitability, difficulty and lack of scalability. In other words, they lack hospitality.

Among Derrida’s many works that address hospitality (For example: Margins of Philosophy, 1982; Politics of Friendship, 1996; The Other Heading, 1992; Specters of Marx, 1994; Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, 1998; Of Hospitality, 2000; On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, 2001; “Hospitality,” 2002; Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2, 2004; Sovereignties in Question, 2005) he writes: “… hospitality must wait, extend itself toward the other, extend to the other the gifts, the site, the shelter and the cover; it must be ready to welcome […] the opposite is also nevertheless true. Simultaneously and irrepressible true: to be hospitable is to let oneself be overtaken, to be ready or not to be ready […] precisely where one is not ready to receive” (2002, 361).

Successful collaborative networked teaching and learning involves techniques that practice hospitality. Doing so requires an approach to teaching colleagues and learners that has co-hosting at its core. This does not involve the erasure or elision of foreignness or familiarity; instead, these dynamics are mobilized in the service of education rather than profit. Waiting, gifting, sheltering, welcoming and receiving. Collaboration over networks across geographical distances is complex, and Derrida’s conception of hospitality makes eminent sense of its complexities and outcomes.

“Hospitality” characterizes the attitude required for teaching via collaborative online teaching because the efforts involved in planning a collaborative session require teachers to be “open” not only to each other, but to whatever surprises arise from that collaboration. The processes of creating a session plan for learning involve real-time communication, which not only demands vulnerability, reciprocity and mutuality of interactions, but it also requires an openness to surprises, or, what often are misrecognized as “failures” or “mistakes.”

The experience of a team-taught collaborative session in real-time is an act of “co-hosting” in every sense of the word. The related activities have no mobility abroad, no corralling of each students into programs (MOOCs, distance education, or transfer credits), no extension campuses or delegation missions of administrators. The session takes place in a neutral space on third-party open or free applications, where the resources and activities are co-designed for active learning such that learners cooperate and co-create their materials. Learners and teachers alike host each other in these virtual spaces, where reciprocity and mutuality of interactions is demanded by the technologies in use. The hospitality of co-hosting, then, is at the core of the collaborative networked teaching pedagogy.

The sort of pedagogical innovation demanded by hospitality is somewhat inimical to the conventional internationalization strategies. One objective is to enable learners to be open to innovations and strangers, and teachers must model vulnerability as a part of this pedagogy. Since the interactions is between classes at actual institutions, and not massively open to anyone, there is no need for a “border guard” mentality. All the participants are simultaneously foreigners and at home vis-à-vis each other’s virtual presence. Hospitality takes the form of invitations, not demands, to make each other known. And so there is a different kind of trust enacted by teachers and learners in the networked collaborative class sessions.

There is a stark contrast between the hospitality-based collaborative networked teaching and profit-based conventional internationalization strategies. The former involves co-hosted experiences -integrated into the regular curriculum – across free or open platforms using existing resources. It is entirely feasible for an entire institution to co-host in these international learning experiences. The latter strategies are impossible on such a scale. Students, staff or faculty abroad always remain foreigners who are hosted by some institution for a specific duration. They are not at home. They go home. Institutional extensions abroad, whether online or bricks-and-mortar, are always controlled by a home base. Always temporary and already limited, these strategies lack the scalability to make internationalization a norm in higher education. Should an institution wish to normalize internationalization, collaborative networked learning should be seriously considered as a means to close the gap between intention and actualization.