Conference Program

Amidst rapid and tumultuous changes in social, political, and educational contexts, professors may design and implement pedagogical innovations to promote democracy in education. This presentation discusses outcomes of Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) projects through the connectivism theory, focusing on students in Italy and the United States (Florida) using multimodal communication tools for meaning-making, multilingual dialogues on critical societal self-selected topics. In this study, meaning-making is understood as a relational and dialogic process (Freire, 2000) through which students interpret experiences and negotiate understanding in interaction with others. From a sociocultural perspective, meaning emerges through mediated dialogue rather than in isolation (Vygotsky & Cole, 1978), often fortified with multimodal communication tools, such as images, written texts, oral expressions, and auditory messages (Kress & Bezemer, 2023). Connectivism theory offers a framework for understanding knowledge construction across networks of people, ideas, digital tools, and information sources (Bates, 2022; Siemens, 2005). From this perspective, learning is understood as a relational and networked process that aligns with COIL, an innovative pedagogical approach that facilitates dialogic inquiry, international collaboration, and shared meaning-making around complex societal issues (Rubin & Guth, 2022). Because perceptions of societal issues are shaped by individuals’ cultural, political, and economic backgrounds, international dialogues can open windows into interpretation and understanding across contexts.

To promote college students’ critical thinking and global and interlingual competence for societal transformation, we designed an interdisciplinary COIL project between Italian students majoring in tourism and students in Florida majoring in education. To share with their partner, each student developed a multimodal presentation on a self-selected topic such as democracy, power, accessibility to resources, education, demographic and social trends. Subsequently, teams of two students collaboratively facilitated a series of synchronous, virtual dialogues, including linguistic negotiation that highlighted the role of multilingual repertoires in shaping participation, especially for predominantly monolingual US students. Dialogic learning concluded with individual reflection and in-class discussions about democracy.

Empirical analysis of the multimodal dialogues indicated the connection between students’ topics and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (United Nations, 2015). Given participants’ different cultural, linguistic, and experiential backgrounds, it is significant that the thematic analysis of students’ self-selected topics (Creswell & Poth, 2013; Kress & Bezener, 2023) showed a shared interest and connection to educational and societal issues, such as race, ethnicity, poverty, gender in education, educational rights, politics and perspectives in higher education, and the vulnerability of women in society. In addition, the analysis of students’ discourses in terms of negotiating meaning-making about democratic issues showed the use of multimodal communication, e.g., narrative, visual and auditory modes. The context of such interpretive dialogue on relevant social narrations included individual stories and descriptions of everyday life, private lives, work experiences, community life, supporting data, and policies, along with representations of exclusion and marginalization. The increased awareness of cross-border historical and geographic contexts became intertwined with empathy and emotional insight, resulting in rich, multifaceted perceptual transformation regarding social dynamics, and linguistic expressions. This study offers validation for the benefits of dialogic interdisciplinary learning across cultures and languages.