This presentation aims at describing and discussing a virtual exchange environment designed through three continents to support the learning and collaborative activities of student-teachers from Brazil, Spain, France and Taiwan. Content analysis of the students’ experience journals will be presented to show their impact as emerging practices of reflection and negotiation.
This presentation aims at describing and discussing a virtual intercultural exchange environment designed through three continents to support the learning and collaborative activities of student-teachers from Brazil, Spain, France and Taiwan. This experience started in 2017 and has been repeated and refined ever since. The objectives of this learning/teaching/researching environment will be presented within the broad context of globalization as groups of students from four different languages and cultures work together using the medium of English as a Lingua Franca to exchange their views on Education through collaborative tasks. Their four teacher-researchers also work together to sustain and support the environment and to do research from the learning data collected. In this presentation, the data analysis will be discussed from the micro perspectives of students’ relations engaged in three different common tasks: introducing themselves and reporting as a group, discussing together about education, writing an experience journal as an individual reflective task. An in-depth content analysis of the experience journals of the students will be presented following Grounded Theory, in which the themes emerged through collaborative work done by the researchers for coding. The software MAXQDA was used to manage the data and to assist in carrying out qualitative analysis. From our results, we will discuss what experience journals are and what they are used for, and how they prove to be essential tasks as emerging practices of reflection and negotiation of intercultural reality when different perspectives interact. This three-continent environment also helps build emerging core educative cultures among future professionals in education for either teachers of English in primary or secondary education or education counsellors or supervisors. The challenges of such a learning/teaching/researching environment will also be addressed, as this is part of iterative work in progress in new educational practices in languages.
