Beyond Campuses and Across Cultures: Circles of Conversation in Postdigital Learning Spaces

This chapter explores an educational and intercultural study abroad program that involved New Zealand student-teachers visiting a range of educational sites in São Paulo, Brazil. The program included diverse learning tasks, both remote and in-person, specially designed to foster discussions around the social, political, and economic dimensions of education. The chapter first introduces the background and design of the study abroad program, followed by an analysis of students’ learning experiences in the diverse educational and cultural sites visited. Analysis of excerpts and images extracted from the student-teachers blogs reveal challenges and insights experienced during their intercultural journey. A key contribution of this chapter revolves around exploring how the pedagogical strategy of ‘circles of conversation’ manifested within the postdigital learning space in this study. Drawing on Canclini’s notion of ‘hybridity’, on Freire’s critical theory, and on postdigital thinking, the chapter frames the digital as situated on vivid entanglements within a broad socio-political, economic, environmental, and cultural context of the Global South.