Telecollaboration in Online Teacher Communities of Practice: The Cases of Webheads in Action and ArgentEgypt

• In Event: Multiliteracies in Educational Global Collaborations: Educators and Students Connecting and Collaborating Cross-Culturally

Abstract

Purpose and Theoretical Framing
With the advent of computer-mediated communication technologies (CMC), Web 2.0 tools and social networking sites, and their affordances to enable learners and teachers to connect across boundaries, teacher collaborations began to spread worldwide, leading to the emergence of the term telecollaboration in language teaching (O’Dowd, 2007; O’Dowd & Ware, 2009). Examining an online community of practice of English Language teachers around the world, called Webheads in Action (WiA), I illustrate how such telecollaboration is enabled in online teacher communities of practice. Furthermore, focusing on a specific case of multi-layered telecollaboration (aka ArgentEgypt), between two EFL teachers (one in Argentina and one in Egypt) and their grade-level students, which emerged as a result of the teachers’ participation in WiA, I analyze the implications of telecollaborative projects for English language learner agency, empowerment, and multilingualism.
Methods and Data Sources
Based on a year-long netnographic fieldwork (Kozinets, 2010; Author, 2013) conducted with WiA, the data for this study consist of 8 in-depth ethnographic interviews with selected members of the community, archived data (1600 emails, and screenshots of community artifacts and sites), and fieldnotes taken during online participant observation of the community’s main events and activities. Additional interviews with the two teachers of the specific ArgentEgypt telecollaboration, and the archived interaction of 1206 posts and comments from their Facebook group further informed this analysis.
Findings
The analysis reveals that the characteristics of the culture of learning in the WiA community (such as volunteerism, open access, collectivity, idiosyncratic discourse practices, social learning, and a shared understanding that “everybody is expert”) organically led to telecollaborative activities among teacher members and then extend to their students. For instance, all the activities of the WiA community are carried out on a voluntary basis, and the community artifacts and resources co-constructed by members are open to public. After meeting virtually in such an open-access, five-week-long, online workshop organized by volunteer members of the WiA community on how to use computer-mediated technologies in English language teaching, two EFL teachers from Argentina and Egypt implemented a Skype-based interview project, and then created a Facebook group, to provide space for their students to further practice English in an authentic way. The findings indicate that the function of this space went beyond the sole purpose of English practice, as students and the teachers drew on their multilingual resources in interacting with each other, for a variety of functions such as establishing solidarity, and raising intercultural awareness. Students were continuously positioned as language experts of Spanish and Arabic, rather than learners of English, as these two languages became the main topics of interest and conversation within ArgentEgypt.
Significance
This study contributes not only to our understanding of how online teacher communities are successfully sustained but also to the growing scholarship on telecollaboration that empower language learners as multicompetent users of multiple languages (Cook, 1992). Finally, it extends our understanding of telecollaboration to also include teachers collaborating at a distance for a variety of purposes that result in their professional development.

Author

• Derya Kulavuz-Onal, Salisbury University