Expand and Contract: E-Learning Shapes the World in Cyprus and in California

In the spring of 2008, university students enrolled in courses at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB), and the University of Cyprus (UCY) participated in a cross-cultural e-learning project in which they studied American Indian literature and history. All students followed the same six-week syllabus, which included shared readings and films. These common texts became the basis for dialogue via online discussion boards as students struggled to explain causes of prejudice, ethnic conflict, racial hatred, and genocidal acts. Their interactions and reactions with these materials brought to light the many guises of historical and contemporary cultural conflict and suffering: dominant groups marking Indigenous peoples for extinction, film and literature depicting such groups as prematurely “extinct,” religious factions often being responsible for past and present horrors, and societies and institutions perpetuating hatred through focusing on skewed histories.

For American students, stories of American Indians and genocide deepened implications of their country’s history and exposed untold truths. Students in California, whose knowledge of American Indian history was nearly as nonexistent as that of their Cypriot peers, were appalled at the historical facts of forced sterilization of Native women, of Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) boarding schools, of extermination by smallpox, and of the US policies of “Kill the Indian, Save the Man”—all of these issues illustrated in reading materials and in the documentary The Canary Effect (2007). For students in Cyprus, studying US policies that led to the persecution of American Indians not only gave them a more enlightened view of American history but also illuminated their own country’s past acts of genocide. In their analyses of these same materials, the Cypriots began to compare the historical mistreatment of American Indians to their own country’s “problem”—a thirty-five-year division between cultures, marred by wars, isolationist politics, prejudice, and fear—known worldwide as “the Cyprus Problem.” This project thus facilitated the expanding of students’ learning as their learning crossed national boundaries while encouraging them to also focus on their own country’s lesser-known histories.

Background

This international classroom and subject exchange project was developed after Professor Nancy Strow Sheley received a Fulbright Award to teach American Studies at UCY in Nicosia, Cyprus, in the spring of 2008. Her proposed course was titled “The Conflicted American Dream: Multiple Perspectives, Critical Views.” Also that spring, Professor Carol Zitzer-Comfort was scheduled to teach “American Ethnic Writers” at CSULB and planned to emphasize protest literature. We developed a six-week shared unit, digitally connecting UCY students with those at CSULB, in order to have students read the same materials, respond to the same prompts, watch the same visual media, and correspond online, via the Discussion Board (Black Board). As the project planning evolved, the following guiding questions emerged to frame teaching and research:

• • How can American Indian literature (film, popular culture, ideas) be used to examine cultural conflict and how such conflicts are maintained? How does protest literature focus on the issues, and when does it become effective in addressing conflict?

• • What similarities can be found among (a) the cultural divisions in America that result in the “conflicted” American dream, (b) the treatment of American Indian peoples past and present in America, and (c) the social, cultural, political, and ethnic divides that currently exist in Cyprus?

• • How does digital technology inform pedagogical choices for this project?

• • How will two different cultural groups respond to the historical genocide and subsequent “survivance” of American Indian groups?

• • Does proximity to the issues of Native Americans, among students in the United States and Cyprus, suggest more empathy for the human situation, or can students a world apart find examples closer to home to relate to human suffering caused by political decisions?

• • Specifically, will Cyprus students allude to “the Cyprus Problem” and the divided country in their responses about cultural injustices, prejudice, and alienation?

• • How will the analyses of the issues surrounding Native American genocide and subjugation relate to major themes in the course: How is history written as “truth,” who writes it...