Virtual study abroad for students of Spanish: a site for anti-racist and equity-driven learning and relational justice

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become imperative to offer alternatives to traditional study abroad (SA) and re-imagine language and culture learning from home. This study explores a short-term virtual study abroad (VSA) program that was offered in 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic as a relational space for anti-racist, equity-driven learning, centering the experiences of a group of undergraduates from a minority serving institution in the Southeastern U.S. engaging in a VSA with academic partners in Peru. Using semi-structured interviews, questionnaires, and coursework, and guided by a relational justice framework, the study traces how students’ interpretations of language, identity, and race were scaffolded by specific instructional mechanisms, namely Peru-U.S. comparative prompts across assessed tasks, event-linked journaling tied to site visits/workshops, and structured peer dialogue. Findings suggest that these mechanisms made students’ cross-context reflections around raciolinguistic hierarchies, institutional inequity, and ecological relationality visible, while surfacing interpretive risks (temporal othering, decontextualized analogies) that became objects of further pedagogical critique. VSA has the potential to expand access and to scaffold equity-oriented analysis when comparison, debriefing, and dialogic routines are built into the program design. The study concludes with recommendations for designing SA/VSA programs that center anti-racist, justice-oriented approaches to global learning.