Climate Movements virtual exchange as an internationalisation at home initiative in France

Abstract

Virtual exchange has widened internationalisation to more inclusive internationalisation at home initiatives. This study is set in a higher education context where 122 students from a public university in southwestern France took part in Sharing Perspectives Foundation’s flagship Climate Movements virtual exchange. In this context, L1 French learners of English, who majored in the hard sciences, interacted on a weekly basis with other students worldwide on the sensitive topic of climate change, marking the critical turn of virtual exchange projects (Helm, 2016; O’Dowd, 2016, 2018; Zečević & Milekić, 2022). The data (questionnaire responses, reflective journal entries and interview transcripts) were collected into textual corpora and read for repeated emergent themes through conventional content analysis (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005). The perceptions of the participants strongly suggest that Climate Movements virtual exchange is pivotal to internationalisation at home initiatives carried out in English as a second language.

Keywords

• virtual exchange
• english as a medium of instruction through virtual exchange
• internationalisation at home
• french higher education