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Paper Presentation Bilingual Teacher Education Regular Presentation (30 min)
Pre-Service Teachers’ Perceptions Toward Global Learning Experience: Implications for Teacher Intercultural Competency Development
With the shifting makeup of diverse student populations and their needs in today’s changing landscapes of education, teacher education reforms in the U.S. have placed a premium on the development of knowledge and skills that characterizes culturally and linguistically competent teaching necessary for pre-service teachers to address the needs of a changing society. Drawing on existing frameworks of orientations and pedagogical knowledge and skills for enhancing teachers’ intercultural competency, this study examined pre-service TESOL and Bilingual Education teachers' (N = 17) attitudes and perception of their global professional experience in a fieldwork assignment where New York-based teacher educators conducted a ‘virtual school visit’ to a school in India where they were guided by their Indian global partners to survey the host schools’ learning environments and teaching practices.
To explore and gauge the knowledge and skills candidates gained through this intercultural experience in teacher education courses, the author analyzed candidates’ forum discussions and reflections as they discussed the findings of their curricular investigations in their collaborations with their cross-cultural partners. Selected participants were interviewed to discuss their learning via digital platforms, such as emails, discussion boards and video-conferences.
Results indicate that while most participants are aware of pedagogical knowledge related to second language and bilingual acquisition and aware of the need to work with students from diverse cultures, there were significant levels of knowledge gaps when they were taken out of their cultural and linguistic comfort zones. The author recommends that teacher education programs incorporate a critical approach to global learning experience in teacher education programs to address these knowledge gaps in theory and practice throughout meaningful experiential learning in a comprehensive, long-term manner, so that candidates can develop the knowledge and competencies necessary to engage differences and strengthen their commitments to moving toward more equitable learning outcomes for all students.
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Ching-Ching Lin, Ed.D. is a Taiwanese native and a teacher educator based in New York, USA. She is Co-Editor and a contributing author of the following two volumes: Inclusion, Diversity, and Intercultural Dialogue in Young People's Philosophical Inquiry (Brill Publishers, 2018) and Internationalization in Action: Leveraging Diversity and Inclusion in the Globalized Classroom (Peter Lang Publishing, 2020). Her research interests mainly focus on engaging diversity as a strategic action plan for change.