About the webinar
Student to student projects across continents are a pedagogically-sound addition to teacher-led online instruction. We outline an ongoing telecollaborative project which involves science students in the UK, Palestine and Malawi. Working together, the students look for contextually-appropriate engineering responses to technological challenges. A ‘pluriliteracies’ approach pushes them (via the content-requirements of their projects) to work at a cognitive level that is more demanding than their grammatical ability. The in-built need for communication ensures that language-use is authentic, building measurable confidence in a short time. Meaningful intercultural engagement is a final impact, helping to build what Paolo Freire termed 'critical consciousness'.
Watch a recording of the webinar below
(recorded 1 July 2020)
About the speakers
Anna Rolinska has 20 years of experience in teaching English as a Foreign Language and English for Academic and Specific Purposes. She has worked as an EAP Lecturer at the University of Glasgow and now is currently working full-time at the Glasgow School of Art teaching and co-ordinating EAP on the Foundation Programme and a bespoke Pre-sessional course. Her research interests include academic literacies, multimodality and creativity plus the use of learning technologies.
Abeer Abuzayed is a self-employed machine learning engineer and a former IEEE member who has graduated recently from the Islamic University of Gaza and attended the University of Glasgow as a part of the Erasmus + exchange program. She loves to play with data, particularly text data where she is interested in natural language processing (NLP) and Arabic NLP. Her current interests include working in research related to the machine learning field and NLP.
Bill Guariento is Senior Lecturer in English Language at the Faculty of Arts, Design and Social Sciences, Northumbria University, England. He has over 20 years’ experience in teaching English at the University of Glasgow, including teacher-training and masters supervision, and co-ordination of pre-sessional and in-sessional courses. His main interest over the past five years has been the use of telecollaboration for project work, to enhance language skills and intercultural awareness via peer-to-peer communication. He is currently exploring pluriliteracy approaches to language-learning.
Nazmi Al-Masri is Associate Professor at the English Language Department, Islamic University of Gaza, Palestine. He has been teaching several courses for undergraduates and graduates including Technology in TEFL and Oral Communication skills. His main research interests include pedagogy and technology and intercultural communication. He has been a co-investigator on more than 15 British and EU-funded research, capacity building and mobility projects in full partnership with British and European universities. He co-published several education-related research papers in international journals.
Wilson Mandala is Professor in Immunology, and Executive Dean of the Academy of Medical Sciences, Malawi University of Science and Technology. He has served as the Director of the Research Support Centre, College of Medicine in Malawi, and as the Associate Director of the Malawi Liverpool Wellcome Trust. In previous research work, he has looked at malaria in children, and the effect of HIV in pregnancy. His current research interests are mainly in malaria, non-typhoidal salmonella (NTS) and HIV/AIDS immunology.
You can read more about this project in the original ELTRA research report