Global classroom sets stage for cultural exchange

East Carolina University theater students had to do some digging to uncover their latest stage production, an adaptation of the Peruvian folk of “The Three Shovels.”

Students used the Internet to locate a tale of the farmer who loses his shovel in a magical lake. But the story didn't come from Amazon.com. It came from the people near the Amazon region of Peru through a link between ECU and a university in Lima.

“We were actually talking to people in real time,” said Patricia Clark, associate professor in ECU's School of Theater and Dance. “We're always trying to gather multicultural stories, and what better way to do that than to be able to link with other countries ... and for them to share their stories with us and for us to share our stories with them?”

A decade ago, such communication between a university in North Carolina and one in South America might have seemed like a tall tale. But in the last five years, ECU has begun conversations with students in 22 countries.

The award-winning Global Academic Initiatives project has helped more than 1,000 ECU students and 4,000 students around the world interact with other cultures without leaving the classroom. The global understanding course — developed by Rosina Chia, assistant vice chancellor for global academic initiatives, and Elmer Poe, the associate vice chancellor for academic outreach — uses live video and chat technology to give international exposure to students who might not have time or money to study abroad.

Since the course began in 2004, the university's use of the technology has broadened to include offerings in global health and software engineering that are taught by partnering professors on different continents. Other departments at the university have found ways to make their courses cross cultures.

The university offers workshops each semester for faculty members interested in learning more about the global classroom concept. Clark attended one of those workshops in the summer of 2008. By fall, her theater education majors were talking online with students from Russia and Peru, gathering multicultural tales for ECU's Storybook Theatre to use on its tour of area elementary schools. The Peruvian partnership also yielded a featured story for Storybook Theatre's stage production “All Aboard South America: Mighty Mysteries, Wonder and Mayhem!” (See related story in Look).

“You just give (faculty) a little bit of seed, show them you can do something like this, and there's no telling what they come up with,” Chia said. “Without extra work, without extra money, we are just adding some international component to what they're doing, all across campus.”

Poe said many of the university's partner countries are able to become a part of the global classroom for an initial investment of less than $500, including software. Universities need nothing more than a video camera, microphone projection screen and Internet capability.

“We've intentionally chosen to go that route because in many of our partnering countries, they're in the development phase,” Poe said. “In the development phase, there's not a lot of money to invest in technology.”

The program's accessibility has won the university praise from everyone from peers in academia to ambassadors in other countries. Last year, the Global Academic Initiatives project was recognized by the Institute of International Education. Last week, the project received the Nikolai Khaladjan International Award from the American Association of University Administrators.

Similar initiatives have been launched at the University of Michigan, and schools throughout the country have begun to look at ECU.

“The program is so exciting,” Poe said. “It's exciting to see students from eastern North Carolina sitting in a classroom, exchanging ideas, working with students in China, working with students in India.”

Except for joint courses like global health, students are not necessarily paired with other students in the same discipline. Clark's theater students, for example, converse mostly with business and economics majors. Still, students share a common interest in things like movies and music.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that about 10 percent of students who enroll in the global understanding course gain an interest in studying abroad.