Experiential Learning of Telecollaborative Competences in Pre-Service Teacher Education

This paper aims to contribute to the growing literature on how prospective foreign language teachers can learn to be successful telecollaborators. We investigate Polish and German TEFL students' perceptions of how they develop the competences, attitudes, and beliefs described by O'Dowd (2015) through experiential learning in a virtual exchange. Using grounded theory as its research methodology, our study used data from three different sources: (a) a pre- and post-project survey investigating students' changing perceptions of the relevance of telecollaboratively taught classes for their professional and personal development, (b) a survey and ethnographic observation focusing on students' perceptions of and attitudes toward distributed teaching presence in the exchange project (cf. Turula & Grau, 2018), and (c) a case study employing a survey and a semi-structured interview with a participant who carried out her own telecollaborative project in a primary school. The necessarily tentative results of this small-scale investigation point toward the suitability of the experiential learning approach for the development of organisational, digital, and pedagogical telecollaborative competences, potentially shaping prospective teachers' attitudes and beliefs.