Publications:
Tsao, J., Alhadad, S., Heinrichs, D.H., Hameed, S.A., McLay, K (2025). The digital-intercultural-transdisciplinary nexus: Online international exchanges for transdisciplinary education. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology.
Digital technologies for intercultural exchange and transdisciplinary exploration
By Jack Tsao, Sakinah Alhadad, Danielle Heinrichs, Suraiya Abdul Hameed, Kate McLay
About
This study examines how digitally mediated online international exchanges foster intercultural and transdisciplinary learning involving students from universities in Hong Kong and Australia. Using Bourdieu’s concepts of field and habitus, the research highlights how digital technologies create spaces for collaboration, ambiguity, and reflexivity through the intercultural, enabling students to address real-world problems like student wellbeing through inquiry-based and collaborative learning.
Key findings and contributions:
- Digital platforms facilitated student interactions across cultural and disciplinary boundaries, allowing shared narratives, peer connections, and diverse expressions while promoting intercultural understanding and knowledge co-creation.
- Experiences of ambiguity, conflict, and intercultural tensions within collaborative and digitally-enabled multimodal activities encouraged students to critically reflect on their assumptions and expand their perspectives, fostering reflexive and adaptive capacities.
- Creative and multimodal methods, such as body mapping, re-storying, and digital storytelling, which encouraged students to integrate subjective lived experiences with academic knowledge for transdisciplinary problem-solving.
- Higher education institutions should design and integrate structured online international exchange programs, such as Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL), into curricula to provide equitable and accessible transdisciplinary learning experiences.
- Educators can leverage creative digital tools like Miro, Canva, and storytelling platforms to encourage intercultural dialogue, encourage reflexivity, and engage students in complex, real-world issues.
- Institutions should adopt policies that empower students as co-creators of knowledge by offering mentoring and research opportunities, integrating such programmes into formal curricula, and providing platforms to disseminate their research findings beyond classrooms.