This paper reports on a transnational virtual exchange between university teacher education students in Sydney, Australia and Hamburg, Germany. Their exchange is conceptualised as a third space, a symbolic zone of collective critical reflection in which students were called to reflect upon and analyse their own and their peers' linguistic repertoires and biographies. In so doing, they developed valuable decentering and analytical skills in preparation for enacting critical, responsive and humanizing pedagogies with their multilingual students.
In this time of accelerating globalisation, plurilingual and intercultural competence have become increasingly important features of higher education. In teacher education particularly, these capabilities are deemed essential for working with increasingly culturally and linguistically diverse student populations. Recently, many universities have turned to virtual exchanges to give students online learning experiences of collaborating with people from different geographical locations and cultural contexts.
This paper will report on one such virtual exchange between university teacher education students in Sydney, Australia and Hamburg, Germany. The project adopted a transnational virtual exchange as a pedagogical approach to explore how visual linguistic biographies could be used as tools for developing decentering, an essential element of intercultural competence.
The notion of third place (Kramsch 1993, 2006, 2014) provides a symbolic zone of collective critical reflection in which students were called to reflect upon and analyse their own and their peers' linguistic repertoires and biographies. In so doing, they developed valuable decentering and analytical skills in preparation for enacting critical, responsive and humanizing pedagogies with their multilingual students.
