Since 2003, I have taught a 3-credit Arts & Letters course entitled Cultural Difference and Study Abroad. This course provides students with tools for understanding and interacting with individuals from different cultural backgrounds.

When undergraduate education at MSU shifted first to remote and then fully remote over the course of summer 2020, instructors were faced with the question of how to move in-person teaching onto a virtual platform (with which many of us were unfamiliar!) and still achieve the advertised learning goals and outcomes for students. The challenges associated with this and the solutions developed depended largely on the academic subject matter involved.

As the instructor of a course that seeks to foster awareness of and sensitivity to cultural difference as a life-long skill, I knew I couldn’t simply do away with the hands-on, simulation activity aspect of the class. That would mean losing the opportunity to encourage students to apply the theories under discussion to their own individual lives and experiences. After all, Edward T. Hall’s Foreign Service Institute training courses taught us, some 70 years ago, that theoretical concepts need to be judiciously paired with practical application to achieve useful intercultural awareness.

How could I possibly achieve this balance of theory and practice in a Zoom world?

The answer, as it so often is, was simple.

The hands-on aspect of the course, I came to realize, is not simply a way to engage and energize the students (although, of course, that is a nice by-product). It is a strategy for encouraging students to develop a sense of themselves as living, breathing cultural entities and that means developing skills around self-awareness, self-reflection and self-knowledge. For doesn’t all awareness of difference (cultural or otherwise) require one to look inward, define and understand the self and only thereby recognize what is “other” as different?

The development of these skills doesn’t need bricks and mortar. Indeed, it doesn’t even require the instructor’s physical presence. What it requires is carefully designed assignments that guide the students in the art of looking at themselves and the world around them through a new lens. The remote environment presented me with the opportunity to explore how I could encourage this more systematically in my students.

To be clear – I did not use the virtual platform to provide this form of learning to my students. I am sure that someone more technically savvy than me (and approximately 40 years younger!) would know how to do this. Alas, the closest I got was an online intercultural Bingo application that I used as an icebreaker during the first class hour.

However, had it not been for the pandemic and the move to remote instruction that was forced on all of us, I would not have explored this notion of “practical learning” or taken the time to re-design the course syllabus to achieve this.

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Elizabeth Wandschneider is the Senior Assistant Director for Finances and Operational Management in the Office for Education Abroad and oversees financial transactions for the office, as well as the development and maintenance of health and safety protocols related to education abroad (in partnership with the Office of International Health and Safety).

Elizabeth has taught in five different universities and published on data collection issues around post-program student evaluations. She has presented at numerous regional and national/international conferences on topics ranging from group dynamics in study abroad programs to exchange agreements. In addition, Elizabeth is certified to administer both the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) and the Beliefs, Events and Values Inventory (BEVI). Each fall semester, she offers the AL 200 course through the College of Arts & Letters.