Prof Orsini is currently working on a project entitled: Female Voices in the Third Space using virtual exchange methodology as a basis for researching Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in South-North Collaborative Online International Learning.
The project focuses on VE/COIL and aims to further understand notions of digital inclusion and equality in Higher Education and will run till August 2025. There is still time to get involved please listen to find out more.
So hello everyone um today I’m in conversation with Marina orini Jones about her virtual exchange uh project so um Marina first of all would you like to introduce yourself where you work and what your role is um at your institution um right I’m a centry university and um I’ve been here for
Around 37 years on and off so a long time I started as Italian language assistant then became associate of humanities and recently I’ve joined the research center for Global Learning where I have um a specific remit rela to Virtual exchange collaborative online International Learning yes Marina that’s
What we we’re going to talk about today because I know you’ve been involved and we’ve also been working together on and enough for the past few years on various um coil virtual exchange Collaborative Learning projects now I’m looking at your feem em voices in the third Space
Project tell us um about a bit of background to this project and also what do you mean by Third space yes I think uh it really links to my past as a an administrator of internationalization at home as associate school for school of humanities and my present as a researcher researching equality
Diversity and inclusion uh and how virtual exchange Co can collaborative inter International Learning can support equality diversity and inclusion and so it came to be in the idea of the third space came from the experience of doing coil and I noticed that uh particularly female participants appear to be quite
Empowered in that space and the third space is a concept coin by Baba who was a sociologist Anthropologist not a linguist but it is a space which is Lial and it’s a space which is challenging where things happen um which were not expected before so it is it can be
Transformational and um why is it challenging because um we feel in the team and the team is formed by myself as a co-lead applicant with lyette Jacobs Who U again is not a linguist she has a pass in many many subjects but she also stronger at the moment she’s reading
Educational research as University of the free state in South Africa and um Dr FIA Kira finardi who like me as a past for internationalization at home linked with research and she has even opened New Roads um into decolonizing the curriculum she presenting Francesca Helm very interesting presentation at Uni
Collaboration in Leon on this so we’re trying to mix a few concerts but starting as a third space why third space because we feel um it opens up new ways of knowing of relating um or and of expressing yourself uh while at the same time of being and we are dealing mainly in
Female voices from my point of view with students in teacher education some in service some preservice um some new to U being taught how to teach some quite well-versed in it and what we find is that most of them have never experienced this third space okay and
What happens is that we find they really well a majority of them tend to be from what are defined as ODI countries so countries in the global South because my students I’m in the UK I teach on a masters in English language teaching by Linguistics but my students are mainly
From Bangladesh India Pakistan China Sri Lanka Nigeria uh and many other countries sometimes up to 15 so they uh come into this space uh with a bit of apprehension because it takes them out of the comfort zone but at the same time then they discover they can express
Themselves and there are ways in which they feel it’s a it’s a different learning space and they can do some interesting things in it right so just going back a bit so your project um started last September Marina can you outline your your main aims for this project because
You spoke about decolonization and that’s very much um a buzzword at the moment about decolonizing the curriculum so I’m just picking up on what you said before would you like to to outline your your main names and how it’s going so far well in a way we’re questioning our
Assumptions on Virtual exchange and coil and we designed a kind of theorization based on betti lisk’s um theorization of internationalization of the curriculum which link together conceptualization of local context Global context and how inter internationalizing through virtual exchange coil can support all this in a holistic way right and we argued that
Really um particularly women can develop values and capitals which sometimes they don’t have the opportunity to developed in other learning spaces and these have to do with yes and Equity equality um mutuality inclusivity in terms of values and diversity and in terms of capitals trust cultural digital psychological and
Structural and I’m I’m a bit tense about the digital because I’ve just seen a presentation by crumch which she gave yesterday at a conference in Switzerland where she said the digital capital and digital skills and competence might be a western construct as well so I’m now becoming questioning that as well but
What we we we are what we’re questioning is does coil really do that ah um in terms of intersectionality with a focus on female participants can we really claim it is an equality oriented diversity oriented space or are we perhaps putting too many um assumptions on on coil in terms of
EDI equality divers and inclusion and we also link with um critical virtual exchange which is what Miriam hul and Francesca Helm have worked on for a long time yes I wanted to pick up on that because I I sort of Saw Notions of critical virtual Exchange in your in
Your project so you’ve been going since last September how long is the project going to go for and how many particip how many female participants do you have okay so the project will last until August 2025 and we are bringing together um participants who are participating in
Project which are some of related to apply Linguistics others related to other subjects because a lot of the participants brought in by the south African partner participated in a big project Erasmus Plus project called eudo and you can find details on this online and even iudo was covering diversity on
A grand scale with um hundreds of participants involved and at the moment we’re aiming for 80 participants uh between academic staff and academic students as University students who have been involved in collaborative and International Learning virtual change and at the moment we have to date we’ve already interviewed around
30 students and we have recruited the initial seven staff because we we’re starting with the students and we just finished in the first phase of recruitment for the students and analyzing the data and we’re starting with the interviews with staff in June then we’ll do a second round at the end
Of the year and do the analysis afterwards we recruited mainly um it was kind of self selection and contacts and I I hope to to post into uni collaboration with further recruitment for the second round yes I wanted to ask you are you still looking for other
Recruits and if so how can people become involved in your project if they if you look at the website um for staff at the moment there is a call and it says would you like take to take part and there is um a privacy approved ethically approved
Survey where staff and students can join at the moment we have the staff survey up but we will attach the student one because we just finished the first round with students and we welcome anybody at the moment with staff we have recruited mainly from Brazil uh you Brazil and UK
So we like to have more with students to date we’ve had students from many countries I think 15 roughly and so from four continents so we’ve had Latin America South Africa Europe and Asia and um yes as quite a big variety of students and we’re getting very mixed
Responses but on the whole it seems that what we thought what our little hypothesis was that it does provide a third space where women female students can Thrive seems to be there and another thing which is emerging is the sense of belonging to a community of
Practice uh of uh teachers to be or teachers were and are developing together sharing Intercultural knowledge on local practices which can be very different so for example we’ve had the understanding of different policies between turkey which is interestingly enough classified officially as an ODI country but in the view of our
Participants they were quite surprised to hear that so is also what is a global South so we’re now discussing that as well okay and what is also emerging very strongly from at least the students who are in teacher education to teach English how empowering it was to realize
That there are so many of their peers across the world who are very anxious about their Proficiency in English with thought that they will become English teachers yes yes and the fact that participating in these um sort of for example we are we have interviewed quite
A number of students took part in a in a virtual exchange based on decolonizing the English language curriculum the English language teaching curriculum last semester and we had 61 participants mainly from Brazil Spain turkey South Africa sorry pardon China and uh what came through was they felt very
Intimidated to begin with because of the lead person being me in the UK then they realized that not only I’m not L1 myself in English but all the other participants were also not L1 and they really enjoyed realizing how many varieties of English there were being exp absolutely there are more non-native
Speakers of English than native speakers so I think it’s safe to say there are many many different varieties of English there’s not just one English I think that’s true to say when people realize that you can really see I can relax and I can Comm and use English as a tool to
Communicate rather than feeling intimidated that they’ve got to get all their grammar right and it’s all got to be perfect so and we had one participant was allowed me to quote her um from India was actually I’m very proud of her because she’s actually managed to get a
Scholarship for PhD studies on EDI here as well but she said uh she had always felt her variety of English the Indian variety was inferior until she took part in this virtual exchange on decolonizing the curriculum in Applied Linguistics fantastic and until she realized her feelings were shared with a lot of other
Peers and it seems as well from what we’re seeing um female participants seems to be more overt in this discussion and uh is also much for example a partici from northern Cyprus she said she feels it’s a safe third space the virtual exchange because she said in a face-to-face classroom in her
Country men tend to take take uh the lead yes and women can be silenc yes while in the virtual exchange the coil the way particular we organized it because we had breakout rooms with um immediates and the immediates were often students who had participating the prior
Cycle because we had two starts on our masters the September and January and we tend to recruit students who took part in September to to do it in January as mediators and they felt that the role of the mediator in scaffolding knowledge and the mediators are never the leads
They’re never the main tutors the main tutors stay out of the breakout rooms so it is a kind of really open third space where the safe space a safe space where they express themselves yeah and so we we’re pleased to see that in terms of what we were aiming for which was
Testing our um theoretical framework of EDI um you know does does this framework really resonate with female staff and students staff we can’t say yet we’ve not interviewed them yet but it really seems to resonate with students having said that there is a limitation which is the enthusiastic
Students who really like the experience volunteered to be part um and I’m aware of the fact that uh is not so inclusive in all respects because it really takes students out of the comfort zone and sometimes staff out of the comfort zone so I don’t think the students who the female students who
Were challenged by the experience or whose digital tools were not as good as they could have been um who felt they would never be able to implement something so revolutionary because some they really perceive it to be something which is no they’ve not encountered before yes
AB they might not have come forward so I I think that is a limitation of the study because so far we’ve had the enthusiasts volunteering um and there are some mentions in the interviews were carrying out of the awareness of the fact that not all students bought into the
Experience right not all female students did it’s a learning curve all the time and things evolve so marina maybe um after when your project gets more underway and you have more insights maybe we can revisit and talk again further down the line and you can tell us more about what’s happened during
Your project and things that you’ve found would you come back yes and in fact on the 18th of March which you mentioned we’re going to have the first de semination event for the project which will be in hybrid and anybody interested could look at the third space
Um female voices third space it comes up our website and they can join online if they want to we are a capacity face to face going to be a hybrid event but we’re going to also hold focus groups with the staff and students who have participated and we’re hoping to get the
Staff to fill in the ethics so we can hold the focus groups so we we are likely to have initial results after the event on the 18th okay which is a joint event with this other iudo very large project which also includes Yos Belen from the ha and his team and we mixing
Together internationalization at home models with third spaces where you can grow new capitals and new well EDI oriented um values as well thank you Marina thank you
1 Comment
Wonderful concept of third space and great contribution to empower females in their teaching profession.
I highly appreciate your efforts