Virtual teaching and power dynamics: Implications for decolonial practices in LIC-HIC educational partnerships

Global collaborations, particularly those between low-income (LIC) and high-income countries (HIC), may inadvertently reproduce the very power differentials they aspire to overcome. The Toronto Addis Ababa Academic Collaboration (TAAAC) is a partnership model deliberately built to follow a relational and invited guest model of collaboration with in-person teaching visits by University of Toronto (UofT) faculty to teach within Addis Ababa University (AAU) programmes. The COVID-19 pandemic required that teaching be conducted virtually, which provided an opportunity to explore our assumptions that an in-person component ensured contextual and relational accountability.

This study used a qualitative case study approach that was both descriptive and intrinsic in nature. We sought to examine and describe the adaptations that emerged in response to a shift towards virtual teaching and to understand the experiences of key stakeholders from both AAU and UofT within the specific context of the TAAAC collaboration.

Two foundational principles of the TAAAC model were disrupted during the COVID-19 pandemic: its emphasis on local context and its relational component. As virtual teaching replaced the historical on-site teaching of TAAAC programme curricula, these historical structures were unable to mitigate power differentials between AAU and UofT faculty, teachers and leaders.

The relational and context-specific aspects of the TAAAC model were undermined with the use of a virtual platform. Virtual teaching reinforced one-sided knowledge exchange and decontextualized teaching, thereby perpetuating epistemic injustice within TAAAC programmes. This injustice was experienced as a loss of accountability to the relationships that had built and sustained a longstanding LIC-HIC partnership. While virtual teaching has an allure of being efficient and accessible, our experience suggests that it may be poorly suited within partnerships where context and relationality are cornerstones of efforts to reshape dimensions of power.