Collaborative Online Learning Across Cultures: Narratives From the United States and New Zealand

• In Event: 81.033 - MTCC Roundtable Session 38
  In Roundtable Session: 81.033-5 - Beyond Technology for Technology's Sake: Enhancing Preservice Teacher Learning

Abstract

Enhancing intercultural understandings globally and locally may never have been more important than now. Responding to contemporary calls for educational change, this paper presents findings of a cross-cultural international collaborative project between early childhood student teachers and teacher educators from three universities in the USA and New Zealand. It suggests potential ways to enhance students’ intercultural understandings and competencies through an examination of how the online cross-cultural environment has shaped engagements in local and global practices and educational communities. This analysis explicates our university students’ and our own learning about cultural implications on orientations and pedagogies, and the ongoing shaping of cross-cultural initial teacher education using a new teaching technology called Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL).

Authors

• Marek Tesar, The University of Auckland

• Sonja Arndt, University of Waikato

• Samara Madrid Akpovo, The University of Tennessee - Knoxville

• Macy Halladay