Sharing Pedagogical Decision-making Online:
Challenge #1

Because of a commonly held belief that the Sharing Cultures Program should be a truly shared experience, we have worked to collaborate as much as we could, to make sure that voices were heard, that decisions were not unilateral. This was an incredible challenge for a number of reasons.

First, we do not share a common time zone. This fact may seem pitifully obvious and certainly we can get around time issues, but in reality our exchanges need to take place over longer time frames. Emails cannot and are not answered immediately. In responding to this challenge, we realized that as much as we could communicate using email on a listserv, sometimes we really needed phone conversations – the American morning and the South African afternoon – in order to work through our questions and concerns.