Article Preview
“If it were possible to define generally the mission of education, it could be said that its fundamental purpose is to ensure that all students benefit from learning in a way that allow them to participate fully in public, community, and economic life.”
New London Group (1996, p. 60)
TopPurpose Of The Study And Research Questions
The purpose of this case study was to examine one learner’s (Keira) personal trajectory in an online, transnational telecollaborative learning environment, focusing on how she negotiated (1) her own sense of identity, (2) her perspective on French and American cultures, and (3) the possibility of a transcultural dialogue.
Since the pioneering work of MIT’s Cultura project (Furstenberg, Levet, English, & Maillet, 2001), numerous institutions – and scholars – have explored the possibilities offered by instructional technologies to establish partnerships and dialogues between students living in different countries. Several of these projects, like Cultura, primarily rely on asynchronous technological tools (see, for example, Magnan, 2008; Belz & Thorne, 2006). Some projects focus on what happens in synchronous telecollaboration (Kern, 2009) by focusing on the impact of the learning environment itself on the nature of the interactions, primarily in terms of spatial and temporal features. This study focuses on the learner experience within the learning environment, in particular on issues of process and identity positioning.