Paper Presentation Digitally-enhanced practices in foreign language teacher education: fostering active learning and student engagement in online learning environments more

Sun, Jun 6, 11:30-12:00 Asia/Tokyo

Since spring 2020, Higher Education Institutions have engaged in extensive online teaching worldwide. In this respect, emergency remote teaching has had a deep impact on the development of post-Covid teaching practices at tertiary level. In this light, while devising digitally-enhanced pedagogical practices suited to the new normal, instructors need to take into account some newly emerged dimensions, such as flexibility, a pedagogy of care, and collaborative learning (Bozkurt et al. 2020). As a result, in post-pandemic educational contexts, digitally-enhanced pedagogical practices need to be reframed to provide students with flexible learning implemented from a pedagogy of care perspective (Jackson 2021). Online courses thus need to be redesigned to foster student engagement, student agency, collaborative learning, and critical thinking. In this perspective, this presentation aims to illustrate how transformative learning practices have been successfully implemented, from a pedagogy of care perspective, in an online foreign language teacher education course offered at an Italian university in the present academic year. To this purpose, the analysis of learners’ perceptions collected in the course, showing a high degree of student engagement, student agency, collaborative learning, and critical thinking, will be examined. In the course, implemented within a socio-constructivist theoretical framework (Selwyn 2016), learners have engaged in various digitally-enhanced activities devised in keeping with a design for learning approach, fostering students’ active learning and agency (Goodyear 2015; Rapanta et al. 2020). This presentation may be especially useful to instructors planning to develop highly engaging digitally-enhanced foreign language teacher development in post-pandemic educational contexts.