Seventeenth International Conference on Technology, Knowledge, and Society

Abstract

Collaborative Online Learning Across Borders (COLAB) shapes new epistemological foundations for learning, bridging physical and cultural borders, especially those brought about by pandemic-induced challenges. COLAB consists of a four-week unit of intercultural engagements across universities and countries and is designed for preservice teachers working in an online environment. Since 2017 we (then lecturers at three universities in the US and New Zealand, and now also Australia) have been designing COLAB to facilitate early childhood preservice teachers’ development of intercultural insights and understandings. Arising from our shared interests in reconceptualising teacher education by enhancing meaningful, respectful, and sensitive recognitions and engagements with cultural Otherness, COLAB has emerged as a timely innovation to respond to the constraints that continue to be necessary, as the severity of Covid-19 besets global educational and societal realities. In a time where global connections are simultaneously severed and reinforced, intercultural encounters remain vital as does rethinking how we offer them during and after the pandemic, when traditional student mobility is cut, and the need for new ways of connecting enhanced. In this presentation we share findings and potentialities exposed in the most recent research on our teaching with COLAB, using qualitative data that draws on our students’ contributions to the unit and reflective interviews. We reflect on the potential contributions that such uses of technologies might make to future social knowledge and meaning making and wonder how they might help us epistemologically and pedagogically strengthen existing teacher education programs, not despite, but because of the pandemic.