Telecollaboration projects and FL teacher education

Mueller-Hartmann, A. (2006) Learning How to Teach Intercultural Communicative Competence via Telecollaboration: a Model for Language Teacher Education. In J. A. Belz & S. L. Thorne (eds.), Internet-Mediated Intercultural Foreign Language Education (pp. 63-83). Boston, MA: Heinle & Heinle.

Internet-based telecollaborative exchanges are not only an effective means towards the development of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) but also toward that of critical media literacy. If conducted from a perspective of critical use of Internet-based technology as well as within an experiential and reflective practice approach to learning, telecollaboration can be an invaluable tool for FL teacher education. Seen and practiced as a means of experiential learning and model teaching in foreign language education (FLE), international telecollaborative projects can expand student-teachers knowledge base of Internet-mediated FLE and particularly of ICC and critical media literacy. In this paper, Mueller-Hartman reports on a study of 2-5 years of assignment portfolios of graduate EFL student-teachers in Germany involved in telecollaborative projects with fellow students in the US. His goal is to track students’ ICC and media literacy development and extract best practices for Internet-mediated FLE.

Pedagogically, Mueller-Hartman works from a reflective practice model of learning emphasizing experiential and reflective learning as key complements to reading and discussions of scholarly work, and integrating such activities into the design of telecollaborative projects. He also argues for the power of model teaching for teacher education and emphasizes the multiple roles of the teacher in Internet-based FL teaching as instructor, social facilitator, manager of schedules, time-frames, and institutional constraints, and technical expert. Along with Byram (1997), he sees ICC as “one of the mainstays of language learning” (66) and composed of affective and cognitive aspects, interactional and interpretive skills, and critical cultural awareness.

From this perspective Mueller-Hartman studies the interactions and reflections by the German and American partners to a telecollaborative project for signs of change in attitudes (or of some kind of “descentering” from one’s own position and views through a process of re-socialization into the other culture), in knowledge about groups, there practices, products and processes of interaction; in interactional skills built by way of interpreting and relating the other culture’s artifacts and events to one’s own; and critical cultural awareness.

The participants to Mueller-Hartmann’s study belong to two classes of pre and in-service graduate FL teachers in Germany partnering with another two classes of graduate and undergraduate student-teachers in the US, with one of the pairs of classes (the one including only graduate students, called the B-level partnership) having to observe the work of the other pair (the A-level partnership, including only undergraduate students on the US side) as part of their telecollaborative tasks and exchanges. In the design of the telecollaborative exchange, the A-level partnership was expected to be a laboratory for the construction of B-level partners’ knowledge base of ICC, critical media literacy, and general Internet-mediated foreign language education (FLE). The project design involved a reflective phase after the collaboration, which was guided through specific and engaging tasks (like the drawing of a ‘mind-map’ of students’ view of all the aspects of the collaboration and scrutinizing one particularly striking aspect of it through “the magnifying glass” approach; and the making and later reviewing of “do’s and don’ts” lists as to teaching through telecollaboration projects); and the building of student portfolios which were then used for analysis.

Analysis according to Byram’s ICC categories of attitudes, knowledge, interactional skills showed evidence of ‘decentering’ experiences in student-teachers understanding of their partners and themselves, expansion of cultural knowledge as well as of different telecommunication and interactional conventions. Their interactional skills were also challenged and expanded through this project. All German students experienced the difficulty of explaining ideas and concepts which are not shared by the other culture, and B-level group’s opportunity to observe another group’s telecollaborative interactions made them aware of the potential and value of conflict in telecollaboration as well as the mediator role of teachers in it. The importance of interpretation as the ability to “look below the surface to get to hidden meanings” was also made apparent in these observations. Finally, student-teachers generally also became aware of the importance of media competence in order to guide other people’s Internet-mediated learning processes. This gave them able to reconsider and widen their pre-course expectations for international telecollaboration in teacher training beyond language proficiency improvement. The study’s participants are seen as reporting to feel better prepared for teaching in general and as having expanded their knowledge base of ICC, critical media skills and Internet-based FLE.

The general point of how a reflective practice oriented and well-designed teacher training course based on international telecollaboration can contribute to knowledge base expansion and teacher preparedness is welcome. Furthermore, the idea of having learners practice a particular way of learning while observing other learners do the same and reflecting on this, clearly duplicates the opportunities for “descentering”. It seems an effect worthwhile considering in the design of almost any learning exercise! In terms of the drawbacks of this study, the pathways to discovery of people’s different practices, products and processes of interaction with ‘others’ as well as the pathways to ‘self-discentering’ being so important for IC development, I wonder why the study was not design to obtain at least some information on the experiences of the US students. A contrast of these views and the areas of potential conflict these might have highlighted may have been valuable for student-teachers learning from this study. Finally, even though we learn that some of the conditions for a telecollaborative FL learning project to be successful are for it to be task-based, experiential and reflective the report on this success story does not give us a window into more details of the teaching process: how is conflict dealt with and turned into teaching/learning moments?; what are some difficulties of text search and selection for telecollaborative projects; of project or task design and the drafting of instruction?