A role-reversal model of telecollaborative practice: the student-driven and student-managed FloCo

Abstract

T his paper, based both on a talk given at the BMELTT symposium in June 2017 and one given at the UNICollaboration conference held in Krakow in April 2018, reports on FloCo (Florida Universitària/ Coventry University), a telecollaborative project where the roles of teacher and student were reversed. A student from Coventry University (CU), studying on a Bachelor of Arts Honours in English and TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language), obtained a third year placement to teach English in Spain at Florida Universitària (FU) in València. The student had taken part in the online intercultural exchange MexCo, between Coventry and Mexico, in her first year at university, and decided to set up a similar exchange between the class of students she was teaching in Spain and Year 1 students on Spanish degrees at CU. The shared 'expert student'/staff reflections on the project are reported here and compared with the outcomes of related online intercultural exchanges (e.g. MexCo and CoCo).

Action-research and role-reversal-informed creation of a Zoom breakout room guide for e-CIIC mediators

“…In view of the data emerging, the above-mentioned 'expert student', who is also one of the authors of this paper, proposed to base her MA dissertation on the creation of a BoR guide for e-CIIC mediators, making the inquiry 'expert student-driven' (as with other related projects, e.g. Lloyd et al, 2018) and informed by a student's perspective on a curricular action previously analysed by her tutor. In the role-reversal model of action-research-informed inquiry, a student identifies a problematic issue that relates to their tutor's curriculum and explores it in studentdriven cycles (see Orsini-Jones, 2014).…”

“…The input from an 'expert student' in action research practice has been implemented for a number of years at Coventry University (e.g. Orsini-Jones, 2014;Lloyd, et al, 2018) and provides academic staff with the opportunity to see their practice through 'the looking glass' of their students.…”