Collaborative online international learning, social innovation and global health: cosmopolitical COVID lessons as global citizenship education

Abstract

ABSTRACT While COVID-19 has underlined many global interdependencies , it has also made clear the ways in which these globalised connections are structured by profound inequalities. Teaching in this context has been deeply challenging for many educators around the world. For related reasons, though, the pandemic has also created new provocations for global citizenship education (GCE) attuned specifically to the problems of health vulnerability and sub-citizenship caused by socio-economic inequalities. Describing one such educational opportunity, we examine the lessons learned from connecting two university courses across continents through a Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) collaboration in the middle of the pandemic. Our courses brought together students from India and the US online to study how health vulnerabilities under COVID compared in the two countries. The collaborations of our Indian and American students helped them to develop practical skills in communication across a vast distance, while also offering cosmopolitical opportunities for learning ‘other-wise’. Based on their reflections on their learning in the course, we suggest that the COIL approach provided a useful set of lessons about how global citizenship education can be enhanced through transnational and collaborative, but also critical and comparative attention to sub-citizenship in the world at large.