Course Internationalization Through Virtual Exchange: Students’ Reflections About “Seeing the World Through the Lens That is Soccer”

VE as Active Learning

None, absolutely none of the major vital lessons are learned through scientific processes. It is by walking that the child learns to walk; it is by speaking that they learn to speak; it is by drawing that they learn to draw. We do not believe it is too much to think that such a general and universal process is just as valid for all education, including at school. (Freinet, 1968, pp. 12–13)

Freinet describes active learning, where lecture time is replaced—at least partly—by cooperative work and engagement with material, thus giving students responsibility for their learning (Förster & Rohn, 2015). The active learning concept has been around for at least 200 years (Beichner, 2014), though the term was not coined until 1991 by Bonwell and Eison (O’Malley, 2020). In an active learning environment, students play a central role in their learning process (Förster & Rohn, 2015; Hobbs et al., 2018), and that can be facilitated by technology (Shreffler et al., 2019).

Based on constructivism theory, which hypothesizes that we construct learning new ideas from prior knowledge and lived experiences, active learning requires students to interact with peers to generate new ideas, increase productivity, learn to manage interpersonal relations, and acquire a deeper understanding of the course material (Förster & Rohn, 2015; Johnson & Johnson, 2018). When student groups “work to enhance their own and their groupmates’ learning” (Johnson & Johnson, 2018, p. 62), their “cooperative efforts result in numerous outcomes that may be subsumed into three broad categories: effort to achieve, positive interpersonal relationships, and psychological adjustment” (p. 65). Therefore, strong communication skills are necessary (Kolotouchkina et al., 2020), and that is even more true in VE, as students interact “with others who may not share one’s language, worldviews, or cultural beliefs” (Schenker, 2018, p. 491). By its very nature as a tool to internationalize a curriculum (Duffy et al., 2020), VE promotes intercultural communication and multiculturalism.

VE as an Inclusive Pedagogical Practice

Many U.S. universities, perhaps even most, include global understanding as a core concept of their mission statement (Verzella, 2018). The most evident initiatives to teach students about intercultural competence and global awareness depend on student mobility, that is, foreigners studying in the United States or Americans studying abroad (Duffy et al., 2020; Verzella, 2018). These experiences expand students’ worldview, thus aiding their development as global citizens (Hachtmann, 2012). However, they benefit mostly socially advantaged students (Bilecen & van Mol, 2017; Bowen et al., 2019; Jager et al., 2019). That is why U.S. campuses have recently duplicated their efforts toward curriculum internationalization (Duffy et al., 2020), that is, internationalization at home (Ureta et al., 2021). Therefore, though “the current level of awareness of VE is not very high” (Jager et al., 2019, p. 23), VE projects are still starting to flourish, prompting O’Dowd (2018) to talk about a “mushroom-like emergence of virtual exchange initiatives” (p. 3) in academia.

With the internet occupying such an important place in society, American students are particularly needing this type of engagement with peers in other countries to develop multicultural skills. As Helen Lewis (2020) wrote, “sharing the internet with America is like sharing your living room with a rhinoceros. It’s huge, it’s right there, and whatever it’s doing now, you sure as hell know about it.” Some have argued this constitutes “digital colonialism” (Kwet, 2019, p. 7) as “a handful of US multinationals” (p. 6) now have power in foreign sovereign nations and “undermine local development, dominate the market, and extract revenue” (p. 7). English writer Tomiwa Owolade (2020) also recently denounced the issue: “When asked to analyze the experiences of black people in the United Kingdom, we now talk with an American accent” (para 1). Owolade further argued this does a disservice to “anybody who is truly committed to racial equality” (para 13).

Knowing that and considering current JMC students likely constitute a non-negligible portion of tomorrow’s online content creators, JMC educators have an additional responsibility to raise cultural awareness among their students. VE is one way to attempt to do so, but few publications focus on VE in JMC education. In 2018, Hobbs et al. had education and communication students from the United States and Germany collaborate on five learning activities about political propaganda. They found that VE projects can help media literacy as their students gained “greater awareness of the power of propaganda” (p. 166), particularly as students realized people’s “interpretation of propaganda is bound up with the particularities of local context and culture” (p. 163). Recently, two publications have discussed VE projects in skill-based JMC courses. First, Bowen et al. (2019) used Allport’s contact theory to create a VE project between two graduate-level international journalism courses in Australia and Pakistan. They concluded VE projects could provide important benefits to students, including “the opportunity to view the world from an unfamiliar perspective” (p. 62). Second, Ureta et al. (2021) discussed a VE journalism project involving five universities in Spain, Portugal, and Brazil. They presented details of their VE, which resulted in the production of multimedia projects, and emphasized the importance of interactivity in the classroom, which can help curve the many communication issues students faced. Although informative, these latest two VE projects did not involve any U.S. students, a population that must be examined considering the greatly facilitated-by-the-internet “imposing” of American views (Owolade, 2020) worldwide. With that in mind, this exploratory case study sought out to determine what U.S.-based students perceived to have gained from a VE project.

Learning About Cultural Differences

Most students reported being surprised at how different England was from the United States. They expected soccer to be bigger in England, but they thought English and American cultures were “not that altogether different.” The VE project opened their eyes to the idea that England is an entirely different culture, despite the shared history between the two nations. “England’s way of sports communications is very different than ours here in the US,” one student wrote. “The rules and restrictions seemed to be much stricter in the UK, and even the thought of going into a locker room after a game seemed ridiculous for our British counterparts.” This topic, which was discussed on the first day of the VE project as an ice-breaker, came back in several students’ reflections. They had assumed journalists’ locker-room access to be a universal truth and were shocked to learn British journalists “do not have this privilege,” that locker-room access is an American exceptionalism.

Differences in fans’ expectations were also pointed out, and that, students recognized, affected media coverage in each country. Soccer has grown tremendously in the United States in the past few years (e.g., Bell & Coche, 2020) and it is perhaps the most global sport on earth, but differences remain in how it is discussed in domestic media. “The popularity of the sport, along with the way it affects the local population play a huge part in the way even the article is written,” a student reflected. “US media cares more about a team’s results than analyzing factors that may or may not explain the team’s performance,” another said. Students were quick to notice how important winning is to Americans. One student reflected about Megan Rapinoe’s image, just a few months after the 2019 Women’s World Cup in France, during which she became the “signature element” of the U.S. national team (Bell & Coche, 2020, p. 13): “Many people outside of America view Megan Rapinoe as annoying.” In the United States, “there is a lot more people that support her because she is American and she is good on the field [. . .] People will support her because she is the best.” Another student drew parallels between wealthy teams in the United States and England:

My transatlantic partners made it clear that Europeans, more specifically Englishmen, want to see their team built from within. The act of watching a player grow up and turn into a star for your team is part of the draw. When I explained the way that America views “buying success,” I went right to [the] New York Yankees. [. . .] They have the most championships, and they are always at the top of the payroll relative to other teams. Fans of the team have no issue with the spending, as the new free agents create excitement for the fans, and the wins create team pride.

Students concluded situations “can be seen and analyzed so differently depending on the country” because “different cultures view things in different ways.” Although soccer is the “global game,” they have come to realize it is “not only managed differently but also paid, broadcasted, and developed” differently across countries, which has allowed them to “develop an understanding of the international diversity in the coverage of soccer”:

Almost all parts of the game business’ side have regional differences depending on the laws, geography, and demographics of varying nations. For example, for something as simple of walking into competition in the US, one would need to have certain international clearances to travel into the US, and sometimes players aren’t able to travel due to these circumstances. These are very important factors to consider when attempting to cover soccer on the international level.

Beyond those differences, students conveyed acquiring a new understanding of sport’s power to unite people. One student said, “Though we lived in entirely different parts of the country and world it was amazing to see the similarities and passion for sports come together.” A classmate explained further: “Some of the UK students weren’t even sports fans [. . .] and still, they understood the importance of soccer and they were excited about it.” The VE project helped students understand that some “topics that transcend continents and are shared around the world” allow people to connect as human beings regardless of differences. “It was pretty amazing to me how easily the game of football could bring people from all different walks of life together,” one student wrote. All these realizations fulfill, at least partly, several of the project’s objectives: The students not only explored but also learned to value cultural differences between the United States and England, as evidenced by their awe of sport’s power to unite. In turn, this also satisfies U.S. universities’ wish to increase their students’ global awareness and understanding, which can help one’s career (Hachtmann, 2012; Kolotouchkina et al., 2020; Miño & Gibson, 2020; Whitehead et al., 2020). In addition to that, students have also reported the VE project helped them develop other workplace and life skills.

Honing Life Skills