Addressing Empathy in Intercultural Virtual Exchange: A Preliminary Framework

Empathy is widely perceived and understood as an unquestioned component of Intercultural Competence (IC). The authors see the ability to empathise with others and to see their point of view as an important condition for developing an ethnorelative viewpoint, and therefore consider it important to incorporate activities into the intercultural communication curriculum that addresses the affective side of IC (Calloway-Thomas, Arasaratnam-Smith, & Deardorff, 2017; Guntersdorfer & Golubeva, 2018). In their paper, the authors discuss the importance of meta-cognitive tasks by creating opportunities for students where they can describe, share, and evaluate emotions. Based on the recommendations made by O'Dowd (2016), Byram, Golubeva, Hui, and Wagner (2017) about designing and implementing virtual exchanges (VEs), the authors present a preliminary framework, i.e. a sequence of self-reflective meta-analysis tasks that they developed for the intercultural VE between students at Ludwig-Maximilians University (LMU) in Germany and their peers at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) in the United States. This framework can be adapted to a variety of online teaching contexts. [For the complete volume, see ED609298.]