MEDIA, Pa. — Penn State Brandywine Professor of Education Lynn Hartle has used technology to give her students an international experience without leaving their home campus.
During the spring semester, Hartle collaborated with Luciana Cabrini Simões Calvo, professor of language teacher education at the State University of Maringá in Brazil, to provide virtual experiences for their students.
Virtual Exchange (VE) projects, in which groups of learners from different contexts interact and develop some shared tasks as part of their programs at a distance without the added benefit of physical travel, have gained importance in “internationalization at home” (IaH) practices that can be more comprehensive and inclusive of all students. In teacher education programs, VE projects are developed with the following purposes, according to an article published in the journal Language Learning and Technology: “to help the students develop digital, linguistic, and communicative skills; to work on students’ reflectivity and propensity for critical thinking, increased openness, and social inclusion; and to prepare prospective language teachers for facilitating their own VEs.”