SDGs and emergency online learning spaces: critical dialogue as a way to develop social responsibility in the “new normal”

Abstract

In the months of February and March 2021, the Virtual “ryuugaku” for real interactions and job-hunting: supporting Covid online teaching of Japanese language oral and written production skills project was carried out at Ca' Foscari University of Venice by the research group NoLBrick (No Level Brick). This project was created with the initial intention of making up for the limitations that the Covid 19 pandemic imposed in regard to educational provisions, and to provide students with both an alternative that would allow them to perform the mandatory internship needed to fulfill the university credits and an opportunity to somehow live the experience of an exchange, albeit virtually, with students from Ca' Foscari and about 30 universities located in Japan. The students who took part in this project had different degrees of responsibility regardless of their level of Japanese and were divided into 20 groups, each having a different theme of discussion. These themes were all related to SDGs and sought to foster dialogues that stimulate active thinking and therefore, an active way of learning. During the weekly online meetings I had with the groups of participants I coordinated, I noticed that the discussions always tended to shift towards their relationship with the themes and how the themes affected them, to the point that it became impossible not to think that the outcome of the project would have been different had the themes been different and less “urgent”. Through the analysis of a diverse pool of data collected during the different phases of the project, this paper aims to describe 1) the impact these themes had on the students in terms of social responsibility and critical awareness, and 2) how the creation of spaces in which dialogic communication is encouraged can play a central role in participants' growth, leading ideally to the development in some of the participating students of a sense of self-empowerment that can translate into action even outside the classroom.