Overview: Sharing Cultures

Overview

Introduction
Project History
Project Vision

Introduction

Welcome to our Sharing Cultures Project web text. This multi-author piece grew out of our featured presentation at Computers and Writing 2005 in Palo Alto. As we prepared a web-based presentation/kiosk for Computers and Writing, where, as a team, we would present in person, we organized much of the information in the ways in which we best understood the project – by participant names. However, we came to understand that information organized by our surnames would mean almost nothing to those not intimately familiar with our project details. So here you will find a more hospitable organization of personal, reflective, and sometimes theoretical information about the Sharing Cultures Project virtual exchange between Columbia College Chicago (CCC), U.S.A. and Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University (NMMU), Port Elizabeth, South Africa. Until 2004, NMMU was known as the University of Port Elizabeth (UPE). We hope to guide you through the experience of the Sharing Cultures Project thus far and share with you what we consider to be the great promise of this type of online, international exchange for faculty and for students.

As much as we believe that this project benefits the students involved in it in multiple ways, in this web text we assert the project’s critical value as a faculty development tool. We have all grown as teachers and as human beings as a result of our participation in the Sharing Cultures Project. We have all experienced shifts – evident in the writings included in this text – in how we see the world and in our understanding of what it might actually mean to share cultures on personal, pedagogical, and political levels. We are certain that in many ways these shifts are also happening for our students and are continuing to gather data so that a later date we also may make stronger assertions in that arena. In the meantime, we invite you to meander through our Sharing Cultures Project experience along four possible pathways:

You will not find a linear argument in each path way, but rather a multi-vocal collage that we hope will provide a sense of both the breadth and the depth of what we have experienced in the Sharing Cultures Project and how our perspectives about teaching, about ourselves, and about one another have widened and shifted over the course of the past four years. We suggest that you begin with our project history and project vision sections, but after that feel free to work your way through the material, following interconnections and creating your own collage or pastiche, or reading one or all of the paths through to the end. All four paths will lead you to our closing space for this web text, which presents our vision of the future for the project and for further research. Ancillary context information is also available for readers who might want a look at additional “nuts and bolts” institutional and project information.

Enjoy!