Swedish and Stanford students co-present their work from different continents

“Hi, let me introduce myself, I’m Eleanor from Sweden,” says the young woman staring out from the video screen. From the other side of the world and nine hours ahead of California time, Eleanor is participating in a joint classroom presentation that includes students from Örebro University, Sweden, and Stanford’s Program in Writing and Rhetoric (PWR).

Stanford students from Stanford's Program in Writing and Rhetoric (PWR) speak in a joint classroom presentation with students from Orebro University, Sweden.

The experiment in webcasting across geographic boundaries and time zones is the brainchild of Alyssa O’Brien, Christine Alfano and Professor Andrea Lunsford, Director of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric. It is just the beginning of what they hope will expand into a large-scale collaborative project across multiple countries and courses. 

“Ours is a rather young and fast growing university in Sweden,” continues Eleanor. “We have exchange students from 42 countries in 12 departments and we have a variety of subjects. School is free, and we study one course at a time. Now Johan is going to talk.” 

And so they continued, alternating with their Stanford peers, who had also prepared short presentations that required them to focus on word choice, timing and delivery in order to make themselves understood by their Swedish audience. 

At Stanford, PWR has so far developed at least one course specifically intended to engage in cross-cultural, technology-enhanced exchanges such as the one taking place in Room 120 on a December morning last quarter. 

“The goal of the course ‘Cross Cultural Rhetoric’ is to enable students to develop effective presentations for global audiences, attending to differences in language, cultural norms and technological familiarity as they explore research areas in political policy, corporate advertising, or human rights,” explains Alyssa O’Brien, Assistant Director of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric and a lecturer at Stanford. 

Slight sound problems aside, the morning of cross-continental webcasts went without a hitch, providing a stepping stone for future, more lengthy and complex multimedia communications between Swedish and Stanford students. Co-teaching courses, sharing pedagogy and resources, and enabling teams of students to work jointly on projects despite their distant locations are just some of the possibilities for the future. 

“The need for effective communication across the boundaries of language and culture have never been greater than they are today,” says English Professor Andrea Lunsford, who directs PWR. “Every opportunity to bring students from different cultures and countries together is golden."

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