Page 74 - Diversity in Action

Martina Irsara, Valentina Gobbett Bamber, and Barbara Caprara

2. What do you think could be the main benefits of collaborating online with
people from other countries?
3. Which modalities would you opt for when collaborating with people from
other countries?

Experience Evaluation and Implications for Teacher Education
with a Focus on Global Citizenship
The short Global Citizenship Education and Plurilingual Learning through Pic-
turebooks initial teacher education course is briefly evaluated here in the
light of formal evaluations by those students participating in-person from
the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano and of anectodal reports by students
and lecturers alike. The formal evaluations were highly positive as regards
all pre-established criteria relating to aspects of: the course, lectureship, stu-
dents’ interest, and infrastructure. To exemplify, as regards lectureship there
was great appreciation of the lecturers’ openness to questions and availabil-
ity for explanations and clarifications – something which had been explicitly
planned, congruently with the course values and aims.
Studentsalso providedwritten open-endedcomments.Theseincludedre-
flections on linguistic aspects: ‘I really liked this course, and it improved my
English skills;’ ‘The teaching and language was really good and comprehen-
sible.’ Anecdotally, students reported they enjoyed speaking English as an in-
ternational language for authentic communication purposes, which was dif-
ficult but interesting. As regards reading picturebooks aloud, some written
comments revealed a wish for more time for such activities during the brief
course: ‘I would have done more practice on the reading and the modality of
reading.’ In this regard, anecdotal reports from the course lecturers also in-
dicate that participants very much enjoyed carrying out read-alouds in pairs
and small groups in the synchronous hybrid settings provided. Additionally,
as regards the online/hybrid course modalities, one student wrote: ‘it would
be nice to do the same activities in a three-day-intensive course in presence,
with all the students from the different universities.’
One partial exception in the students’ appreciation relates to initially chal-
lenging technical aspects of the transnational course. Although participants
eventually managed to collaborate online, initially the Microsoft Teams plat-
form led to connectivity and other issues for those students participating not
as ‘internal’ (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano) Microsoft Teams users, but
as ‘guest’ users, that is students from other universities. To exemplify, video
and/or sound connections in Microsoft Teams meetings were at times unsta-
ble (with such issues compounded by individual students’ issues with their

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