Innovative Teaching to Foster Teacher Candidates' Educational Cultural Competence

Ensuring that cultural sensitivity in teacher education programs is addressed will enhance new teachers' confidence and effectiveness in the classroom. As the result of the COVID-19 pandemic, teacher candidates have experienced a non-contact environment at every stage of their professional education. Specifically, the pandemic impacted the availability and quality of their field experiences, including student teaching, internship/practicum, clinical work in culturally responsive teaching, and study or teaching abroad. Moreover, the shift to online instruction in most school districts required teachers to reconsider their approach to engagement in classroom activities. This article describes how the authors, in response to the limitations imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, implemented a unique program with the goal of increasing aspiring teachers' educational cultural competence. The Online Global Outreach (OGO) program is a field experience that provides a cost-effective and time-efficient way to build pre-service teachers' educational cultural competence by giving them the opportunity to teach virtually in a foreign school when in-person interaction is not feasible. The goals of the program were to increase the teacher candidate's self-awareness and self-confidence and to allow them to gain cultural capital, in terms of culture-related knowledge, social skills, and behavioral norms, that they could apply to their future classrooms.