Designing activity plans in the online pedagogical advising context at the Language without Borders Program: a story of collaboration

Abstract

In this article, guided by the premises of Narrative Inquiry, we aim to narrate and to compose meanings of our experiences as teacher educator and teachers in training in the online pedagogical advising context of the Languages ​​Without Borders Program (LwB). We start from the concept of collaborative action, which means interacting with peers for the construction of collective knowledge, co-constructing teaching practice through awareness and reflection. We relate collaboration with the notion of planning didactic activities that are significant and contextualized in the internationalization process. Firstly, we present the methodology of the LwB online advising path with respect to the production of granular activities focusing on specific skills, which can be incorporated in different courses of the English LwB catalogue. Then, we narrate the experiences of the preservice teachers during the design process of these activities, i.e. the lived tensions and the achieved results, illustrating with an example of an initial and a final product. We conclude by discussing the experiences of collaboration between teacher educator and teachers in training and presenting our meaning-making, which comes down to what we learned in the trajectory narrated.