COILing diverse islands: a virtual exchange between the University of the Bahamas and the Borough of Manhattan Community College

Raymond Oenbring,Deniz Gokcora

doi:10.21827/jve.5.37388

Abstract

This practice report describes a Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) exchange between academic writing students at the University of the Bahamas (UB) and English Language Learners (ELLs) at the Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC) of the City University of New York (CUNY). While COIL projects and other classroom virtual exchanges between Western and non-Western institutions have often been construed as tools to introduce cultural and linguistic diversity into Western classrooms, this study shows that the opposite is also possible. In our project, a diverse, largely immigrant group of postsecondary students in New York City participated in an intercultural exchange with a more culturally and linguistically homogeneous student group in The Bahamas. The study details the digital media used to initiate the virtual exchange and the specifics of the assignment sequences, including how the authors worked with the springboard text read by both classes (that is, Richard Rodriguez’s (1978) noted literacy autobiography ‘The Achievement of Desire’, where he describes his academic ambitions as the child of Mexican immigrants to the United States).

Highlights

As a set of pedagogical modalities that has been in development for some 20 years, a significant body of scholarly literature has developed on virtual exchange (O’Reilly, 2021; Wylie, 2020)
We describe a Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) exchange between diverse multilingual English Language Learners (ELLs) students at a community college in New York City and academic writing students at University of the Bahamas (UB)
A number of UB students noted the immigrant characteristics of their COIL partners in their responses

Summary

Introduction

As a set of pedagogical modalities that has been in development for some 20 years, a significant body of scholarly literature has developed on virtual exchange (O’Reilly, 2021; Wylie, 2020). Known as COIL (see Moore & Simon, 2015; SUNY COIL Center, 2017), students from learning institutions in two or more countries work together in a digital environment on a shared activity, and in so doing they have an opportunity to build cultural competencies and deepen intercultural understanding – along with learning course content. We describe a COIL exchange between diverse multilingual ELL students at a community college in New York City and academic writing students at UB.

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Conclusion