Paper short abstract:

I discuss virtual exchange experiences with university students and reflect on the ethnographic skills gained, as well as the VE process. Experiences were marked by logistical, technical, and cultural challenges, and also by opportunities for the development of key ethnographic perspectives.

Paper long abstract:

As technology changes, so do the possibilities for interacting directly with people around the globe and learning about one another. Educational programs such as virtual exchange / COIL provide interesting pedagogical tools with great formative potential. Such programs may facilitate cultural knowledge, understanding, and empathy between interlocutors, which may be particularly valuable for Anthropology students. In this paper, I discuss virtual exchanges in my undergraduate courses; I reflect on the ethnographic skills gained by my New York City-based university students; and I analyze the virtual exchange structure and learning processes. Participant experiences were marked by logistic, technical, and cultural challenges, and also by opportunities for the development of key ethnographic skills and perspectives such as cultural relativism, reflexivity, and the building of rapport—all at a distance, mediated by technology. Our virtual international exchanges also highlighted power dynamics as students learned to be sensitive to forms of stratification, stereotypes, and ethnocentrisms, both within our partners’ cultures and during interactions with our partners. They came to understand something of the complex cultural contexts that framed their partners’ lives and how these also shaped our interactions during our exchanges. While participating in COIL-type projects is often seen as a way to bring people together to support universalizing discourses such as human rights or the shared human condition, a keen student of ethnography may actually come away with a much more nuanced understanding of the human experience as one that is multiple, needing to be understood through the specificities of cultural framing.