Project Vision

The Sharing Cultures Project creates an online space in which students and teachers from vastly different backgrounds share diverse perspectives, experiences, and beliefs. The students connect through asynchronous discussion in a course space on Blackboard for one semester. The teaching team connects throughout the academic year, primarily through e-mail and conference calls, but teaching team members have had other opportunities to deepen connections by traveling to each other's institutions. In our limited face-to-face interactions, we have found ourselves discovering both the richness and depth of the online communities and the limitations of those purely virtual communities. One of our goals for the future is to establish a pattern of regular, face-to-face student and faculty exchanges so that students and the teaching teams can take full advantage of the foundations laid by the virtual exchange.

Our project works not so much by deploying spectacularly innovative technology, but by providing hospitable access to technology, online community, and the related competencies to particular populations of students in Port Elizabeth and Chicago who have not yet benefited from technology's potential to connect to their lives or to connect them to a wider world. Because the educational missions of both NMMU and Columbia College make explicit commitments to equality of educational opportunity, the Sharing Cultures Project actively focuses on engaging students identified as facing multiple challenges in successfully making the transition from high school to college. Perhaps the central innovation of the Sharing Cultures Project is that, by situating an approach to literacy within an explicit context of cultural and global studies, these courses challenge students more than comparable courses challenge their more traditionally-prepared peers. The cultural and global contexts are made immediate and intimate because students at NMMU and CCC practice their communication and problem-solving skills in direct dialogue with each other.

By encountering common themes and interacting in a shared online space, students in Port Elizabeth and Chicago begin to encounter each other. Using a heuristic that asks students to move from a consideration of self and local culture to larger social and global implications, students write, read, and respond to each other on discussion boards organized around shared readings, personal narratives, current events, and “hot topics” of their own making. Student reflections on the questions, answers, and discussions, which are shared online across national and cultural boundaries, lead to new recognitions of similarities and differences. What we have noted in the discussion boards – and hope to research further – is that rather than using those recognitions to demarcate differences and set themselves apart without ever really hearing or experiencing each other, students respond to each other in ways that indicate shifts, at levels ranging from imperceptible to profound, in the ways they understand and experience the world.
We have also noted the power of this project and the growth that we, the teachers, have experienced personally and professionally through participation in the Sharing Cultures Project. We have spent the last four years expending a tremendous amount of energy to build and maintain the project. We now feel ready to move into the arenas of project sustainability and deeper project research. As we stand at this turning point, we share with you some of the transformative promises and possibilities of this type of exchange.

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