Building Cross-Cultural Sustainability Discourses in Higher Education: A Virtual Exchange Program between Egypt and the United States

As the world struggles with climate change and other environmental challenges related to the production, marketing, and consumption of goods, education can help young people to develop critical and systems thinking skills, and creativity for solving these challenges. The rapid acceleration of the climate crisis has placed enormous pressure on educational institutions to create learning curricula and achieve outcomes that increase students’ competency for socio-cultural diversity, empathy, global stewardship and citizenship. In this article, we present the framework of, and lessons from, a cross-cultural and cross-national virtual education exchange curriculum that utilized service-learning approaches to empower undergraduate university students living in Cairo and Chicago to create solutions to local environmental and social issues. Using multimedia technological tools, students engaged in weekly discussions and joint projects that formed part of their learning assessment. The virtual exchange helped students evaluate and critically assess sustainability issues within their own cities, and to compare these experiences with peers from another continent. The cross-cultural dialogue among the Egyptian and American students generated new, global narratives that placed sustainability in cross-cultural contexts of social and environmental justice, culture, consumption behaviors, population dynamics, social inequities, ecosystems, environmental laws and regulations, and politics. The program led students to reassess some of the discourses they were accustomed to from their own cultural contexts and create more globally inclusive languages of sustainability.