“It was easy and enriching. And it didn’t take much time at all! I learned new things about how others teach a similar course to mine. It was very reassuring, actually. I found out that the way I teach my course is up-to-date and up to international standards.”
These are the words Dr. Alfredo Bautista, Associate Head for Internationalization at the Department of Early Childhood Education (ECE) at the Education University of Hong Kong, used to describe his teaching collaboration with Dr. Kevin McGowan from the Department of Elementary and Early Childhood Education at Bridgewater State University (USA).
They had decided to embark on a Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) partnership in August 2021. Both were about to start teaching a curriculum design course for preservice ECE teachers, and they decided to introduce global perspectives from their respective regions into their lessons.
Dr. Bautista and Dr. McGowan first met over Zoom to share about their courses, student profiles, and the ECE sectors in Hong Kong and Massachusetts. After that, they decided on a plan of action to introduce international perspectives to their students. Even during this first planning meeting, both lecturers learned from each other. While they were teaching a similar course, they did certain things quite differently.
In his course, Dr. McGowan had an activity that involved students working within a budget to plan and purchase materials for a lesson and another activity that involved writing letters to parents to explain the activity to them. Dr. Bautista elaborated on hindsight, “It was interesting to see the emphasis that Kevin gives to the family and how the voices of parents are a lot more central to curriculum design in Massachusetts, as compared to Hong Kong. The experience allowed me to see similarities and differences in how curriculum is designed in both contexts.”
Their collaboration consisted of three elements. First, each lecturer recorded two short 10 minutes videos addressing the students from Hong Kong or Massachusetts in the USA. One video introduced how ECE is in their localities. The other video introduced how they usually taught the curriculum design course.
Second, each professor emailed the unit and lesson plan templates that they usually use in class. These were then shared with students to give them a document of the same type used in another ECE system. This activity allowed students to compare the documents and learn from another system.
Lastly, two students from each course were selected to take part in an authentic student activity. This involved making a video to ask about ECE in the other locality in consideration of taking up an overseas job after graduation. These videos were later shared with all students to learn about the preschool educators' life in another setting.
When asked about his experience doing this COIL, Dr. McGowan told us, “It is important for students to hear about the lived and learned experiences of preservice teachers from other cultures, countries, and backgrounds. They can see firsthand that we are all different and at the same time, we are all the same.”
Written by Sofie Chua (schua@eduhk.hk), COIL Facilitator