Digitalizing Internationalization for Cross-Cultural Collaboration in Early Childhood Education during COVID-19 Crisis: Lessons Learned from the UTFORSK Project

The COVID-19 crisis has posed unprecedented challenges to every aspect of lives across the globe. The cross-cultural collaboration project (UTFORSK) including Norwegian and Chinese early childhood education researchers and practitioners reported in this chapter is no exception. Although challenged, we grasped this opportunity to utilize digital platforms in an innovative way to keep the collaboration sustainable and resilient. We conducted digital workshops in addition to the traditional use of digital platforms for information sharing and communications. This practice has enabled a closer relationship between ongoing professional development and research on education for sustainability. Taking a departure from a project titled Our Neighborhood designed prior to the COVID-19 crisis, we hold a series of digital workshops to share stories, photos, plans, and other artifacts as well as to listen to each other and discuss different aims, conditions, and implementations of each local kindergarten’s project. This chapter aims to present how this cross-cultural collaboration worked through digitalization, especially through a series of digital workshops during the COVID-19 crisis when face-to-face meetings are impossible. It also aims to explore how digitally collected data are used to inform further action. Cultural-historical approach is used to guide the presentation of this chapter. The chapter ultimately aspires to illuminate how to integrate digitalization into internationalization for cross-cultural collaboration in the early childhood education context and beyond.