Pre-service teachers teaching about and across cultures using digital environments: the case of eTutor

Abstract

Increasingly, school teachers are expected to be able to teach about and across cultures, as well as teach in digitally enriched classrooms. Teacher educators are expected to prepare their teaching students for such challenges. One university designed the eTutor online environment to enhance and support the development of pre-service teachers’ (PSTs) intercultural capability, as well as enhance their capability to use digital technologies in their own teaching practices. Over 450 PSTs and school students from eight schools across four countries interacted with each other online for a 14-week period. Participants posted blogs, comments, wall posts and shared images and videos centred on cultural exchange. Despite the challenges of access to technology and conflicting calendars, eTutor was seen by participating schools as a potentially useful way to engage their students in intercultural learning. The experience of interacting with children from multiple cultures in an online environment contributed positively to a shift, for the majority of PSTs, from an ethnocentric to a more ethnorelative worldview. However, PSTs found establishing relationships with students in the online environment challenging.

Keywords:

• Digital technologies
• intercultural capabilities
• pre-service teaching
• online

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Dr Richard Johnson and Mark Pinoli for their invaluable contributions in imagining and bringing to reality the eTutor project, and to Karen Corneille and Sandra Vander Pal for their assistance in analysing the data from eTutor.