Learning English Internationally While Engaging Communities Locally: Online EFL Supporting Community Learning for Young Leaders

Abstract

The clichés it's a small world and the world is our classroom are becoming practical realities for many educators. Increasingly accessible transnational contexts for English language teaching and learning offer new opportunities for local–global learning. This article reflects on a content‐based online English course focused on community youth leadership that was offered for Brazilian teens by U.S. instructors and graduate students. The researchers used the backdrop of English learning focused on key concepts to engage students in critical self‐reflection, collaborative discussion with peers, and civic engagement with their home communities. This course focused on communication skills, content knowledge, and technology practices needed for young adults to engage each other as emerging global citizens. Students wrote reflections on identity, planned and reflected on community interviews, and designed community‐based service projects. The authors describe how students and instructors used a variety of formal and informal communication platforms to experiment with the language and communication strategies students needed to get beyond simple vocabulary practice and into meaningful discourse about contested concepts such as identity, community, social responsibility, social hope, leadership, and beliefs. The authors discuss how students creatively used English across multiple online platforms and geographic borders to reimagine and project themselves as agents of positive social change and emerging community leaders.

Affordances, complexities, and challenges of intercultural citizenship for foreign language teachers

“…Bickel, Kang Shin, Taylor, Faust, and Penniston () was one of the few studies that could be considered an example of a “between countries” telecollaboration experience, as Brazilian adolescents participated in an online EFL course taught by U.S. teachers and student teachers. However, the peer collaborative focus of intercultural citizenship pedagogy (working together to solve an identified need in the community) and peer interaction were not present because of the age gap (Brazilian adolescents and adult American teachers) and the absence of a collaborative bilingual task (they held loose discussions on the topic of identity).…”

Facebook as a Virtual Learning Space to Connect Multiple Language Classrooms

“…Although some analyses have sought to assess the virtual space as a learning environment with connections to the physical classroom (Arnold & Ducate, 2006;Arnold & Paulus, 2010;Irwin, Ball, Desbrow, & Leveritt, 2012), others have observed the virtual space as stand-alone learning environments (Bickel et al, 2013;Mitchell, 2012). This study would be included with the former investigations because the virtual space was set up as a direct extension of four face-to-face classrooms.…”

“…This allowed for us to work backwards as patterns of evidence emerged from the collected data (Strauss & Corbin, 1998). Although the use of the Facebook group function has previously been analyzed (Bickel, Kang Shin, Taylor, Faust, and Penniston, 2013;Blattner & Fiori, 2011), this study was able to bring together two distinct populations of students in order to observe their online interactions. These populations included both future Spanish language teachers as well as Spanish language learners.…”

Translating community development stories: When anEFLwriting course meets service learning

“…Service learning has also been part of the curriculum in many classrooms where English is taught as the first, second, or foreign language, and it has been found to enhance academic skills and knowledge, improve interpersonal and workplace skills, and encourage civic engagement (Askildson, Kelly, & Mick, 2013;Bickel, Shih, Taylor, Faust, & Penniston, 2013;Chaves-Carballo & Villalobos-Ulate, 2015;Crossman & Kite, 2007;Moore, 2013;Perren, 2013;Perren et al, 2013;Rueckert, 2013;Smolen, Zhang, & Detwiler, 2013). Wurr (2013) calls for continuous efforts from service-learning scholars to provide "more rigorous research and evidence-based practices" (p. 398) to move the field forward.…”