This paper presents data from two international projects focused on the interaction between changemaking and digital making in university students. The data is drawn from the contributions of 63 university students located in the United States, Romania, Spain, Belgium, Norway, Denmark and England. Using a design thinking methodology and a thematic analysis of student responses, the aim was to understand how the creative use of immersive technologies, such as augmented and virtual reality, might create an environment for changemaking practices in an international context. Findings suggest that students demonstrated not only enhanced digital skills and student engagement but increased cultural competence and global mindfulness. International digital collaboration can create conditions for students to develop changemaker attributes and identify as changemakers within the spheres of entrepreneurship and education, preparing them to be a force for change in the world.

Digital Learning Across Boundaries: Immersive technologies supporting changemaking in an international context

This reflective article is based on the experiences of two years of teacher training students from the University of Northampton and the Pedagogical University of Weingarten. This article looks more closely at the benefits that international exchange experiences have afforded the trainee teachers involved and how challenges to the process have been addressed. This reflection reveals the value of international exchanges in challenging perceptions and assumptions and how the thinking of the trainee teachers changed following the exchange. This study employs a qualitative approach drawing upon the reflections and experiences of the participants through written and spoken data. The findings reveal trainee teachers developed skills specific to teaching and in particular teaching languages, and they also demonstrated an increased awareness of non teaching specific skills such as problem solving and intercultural sensitivity. The reflections offer insight into how trainee teachers, use, interpret and subsequently act upon the experiences offered in an international exchange.

This paper discusses data related to the final phase of a six-year project entitled Digital Learning Across Boundaries (DLAB): Developing Changemakers. It explores university students’ growing perceptions of themselves as changemakers as they experience novel physical and digital spaces, drawing upon on the reflections of seven undergraduate education students from England who joined students from five European countries in the final year of the project. Using a critical ethnography methodology, this paper embraces reflexivity and immersion in the participants’ experiences. Verbal and written reflections were collated and analysed through inductive coding. The results suggest that the multidimensional and multidisciplinary elements of the project led to transformative learning. Transformative change was experienced as students encountered a series of novel spaces and resolved disorientations that arose within them through collective interaction and personal reflection. This paper concludes that educators value the intersection of learning experiences when planning transnational projects and consider the role of cumulative disorientations, multifaceted novel spaces, and critical discourse in catalysing personal growth.