Modeling Global Teaching Pedagogies in Virtual Teacher Exchange

Globally competent teachers are essential for preparing children to be citizens of a rap idly changing, globally interconnected, and interdependent world (Council of Europe, 2019; OECD/Asia Society, 2018; US DOE, 2018). Global citizens communicate and build relationships within and across communities around the world (Boix Mansilla & Suárez-Orozco, 2020). In facilitated global interactions individuals may learn to communicate effectively, think critically, and address issues of equity worldwide (An dreotti, 2014; Byker, 2016; Dervin, 2017; Wahlström, 2014). Linguistic, cultural, and racial diversity have become salient features of classrooms as migration has increased worldwide (Banks et al., 2016; Pratt, 2015). This shifting global context demands that teachers be prepared to be culturally, linguistically, and pedagogically competent and be able to address global issues and create equitable and inclusive learning environ ments for all students (Cushner et al., 2019; Goren & Yemini, 2017). We are teacher education faculty from a large public university in central Italy and an urban college in the northeastern United States, chronicling how we pivoted an established intercultural teacher education abroad partnership to a virtual exchange. We share our task design that supported the pre-service teachers’ learning through information and communication technology and their preparation as culturally re sponsive and globally conscious educators (see Arndt et al., 2021; Kopish et al., 2019; O’Dowd, 2020; Ullom, 2017). Through our collaboration, we negotiated values- and competence-based approaches to teacher education to transform our respective meth ods courses to models of global learning. We used migration as an interdisciplinary theme to demonstrate global learning pedagogies. We worked together to design a virtual experience that could be embedded into our existing teacher education courses. In the United States, the virtual exchange was part of a required third-year literacy and social studies methods course, and in Italy, it was part of a second-year theories and methods of teaching, learning, and assessment course.