Education Commons^™

“I Don’T Even Know Where Turkey Is.”: Developing Intercultural Competence Through E-Pal Exchanges, Miranda Lin

Journal of Global Education and Research

Using current events to help preservice teachers understand the world they live in encourages preservice teachers to learn about global issues. It also encourages them to develop skills in analytical thinking and reflective judgment by reading and discussing complex real-life scenarios. A semester-long pen-pal project was crafted to help understand how preservice teachers develop intercultural competence, critical empathy, and become less ethnocentric. Twenty-Six American early childhood preservice teachers in Midwestern state were randomly paired with Turkish early childhood preserivce teachers as their pen-pals. The findings of this qualitative study revealed American preservice teachers had learning curves, but many eventually came …