Resumen de Collaborative teaching reflection: insights into a globalized partnership
Laura Eickhoff, Peter I. de Costa
When collaborating remotely and cross-culturally, negotiating control, navigating ambiguities in context, and recognizing one’s own cultural influences require immense amounts of self-awareness when positioning oneself within a project. This is of particular relevance to the field of TESOL as the ever-expanding realm of English language education brings with it an increasing number of partnerships between organizations and individuals from a diverse range of countries and contexts. In this study, two US-based TESOL graduate students, from Senegal and the United States, collaborated on a lesson plan to be implemented by an American university EFL teacher stationed in Timor-Leste. Through the process, the importance of fostering equity amongst Western and non-Western teaching philosophies and traditions, as well as grounding all decisions in a relevant cultural context, became imperative. Complicating measures, however, were resolved by accommodating diverse perspectives, building flexibility into lesson delivery, and trusting the intuitions of the teacher implementing the lesson.
