Videoconferencing for Global Citizenship Education: Wise Practices for Social Studies Educators

Videoconferencing activities hold particular promise for social studies educators hoping to mediate humanizing experiences that will help students grow as citizens of the world. In this paper, we review literature on videoconferencing for global citizenship education and analyze those efforts towards cosmopolitan citizenship. Through our analysis of scholarly, popular, and practitioner sources, we present three general, and often overlapping, purposes for videoconferencing -- intercultural experiences, intercultural projects, and learning about cultures -- while providing a variety of examples and options from elementary to higher education. Educators encourage intercultural experiences when the primary purpose for participants’ videoconferencing activities is to learn about the people, communities, and cultures with whom they engage. The primary aim of intercultural projects is for participants to utilize videoconferencing to complete some task together. Educators can help students learn about cultures by bringing in people from different countries or cultures to share their expert knowledge or perspectives. We hope educators can glean insights from the videoconferencing cases provided in the text so as to make decision appropriate to their unique students’ needs. None of these approaches is necessarily superior to the others, but they may require different time and energy commitments. We also share technology requirements and common problems with videoconferencing. Finally, we conclude with implications for educators and researcher