This paper offers a reflection on English language teacher education in undergraduate and graduate level courses that integrated Virtual Exchange (VE) into their curricula in the post-pandemic period, in academic year 2022-2023. It discusses two different Higher Education contexts, one in the Global South (Brazil) and one in the Global North (UK). It reports on the experience of two ELT educators who engaged with a variety of South-North VE projects and discusses how VE offered the opportunity to both decenter the ELT curriculum through international encounters and ‘upskill’ students in teacher education and their tutors in terms of both digital competences in general and online interactional and intercultural competences in particular, providing a fertile knowledge-sharing and metareflective Third Space in which they discussed what ‘becoming an English language teacher in the 21st century’ entails. The paper will highlight the challenges that emerged, such as scaffolding interaction in Zoom Breakout Rooms and training students to support staff in doing so, while using a variety of interactional online tools. The study adopts an ethnographic approach to analyze and contrast the experience of the two teacher educators during the pandemic with narratives and empirical data published in and about the two contexts. It also discusses issues such as the role of institutional support in the integration of technologies in ELT methodologies, the intersection between access to language and technology and what is to stay in ELT pedagogy after the pandemic. The paper will conclude with a reflection on what technological lessons learnt during the pandemic will stay in view of both the authors’ post-pandemic VE experiences, and a review of the relevant literature and what national/local policies and/or institutional and infrastructural barriers might prevent the lessons learnt during the pandemic to be implemented in some contexts, the use of VE included.

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Abstract Summary
This paper offers a reflection on English language teacher education in undergraduate and graduate level courses that integrated Virtual Exchange (VE) into their curricula in the post-pandemic period, in academic year 2022-2023. It discusses two different Higher Education contexts, one in the Global South (Brazil) and one in the Global North (UK). It discusses how VE offered the opportunity to both decenter the ELT curriculum through international encounters and ‘upskill’ students in teacher education and their tutors in terms of both digital competences in general and online interactional and intercultural competences in particular, providing a fertile knowledge-sharing and metareflective Third Space. The paper will conclude with a reflection on what technological lessons learnt during the pandemic will stay, and what national/local policies and/or institutional and infrastructural barriers might prevent the lessons learnt during the pandemic to be implemented in some contexts.

Authors:
Marina Orsini-Jones, Coventry University, United Kingdom
Kyria Finardi, Univerdidad Federal do Espirito Santo, Brazil

About the Presenter(s)
Professor Marina Orsini-Jones is a University Professor/Principal Lecturer at Coventry University in United Kingdom

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