Professional organisations
The European Association for Computer-Assisted Language Learning (EUROCALL) provides a European focus for the promulgation of innovative research, development and practice relating to the use of technologies for language learning. Among its members and attendees at the annual EUROCALL conferences are many colleagues from outside Europe, attracted among other things by the work of the association’s special interest groups (SIGs). While chairing the EUROCALL Teacher Education SIG (2009 –2016), I led research workshops at the Université de Lyon ( European workshop on teacher education in CALL: towards a research agenda , 2010), at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona ( Getting the Bigger Picture:
Language Teacher Competences in CMC Settings , 2011), and at the Università di
Bologna ( Learning through sharing: Open Resources, Open Practices, Open
Communication , 2012). Since being elected President of EUROCALL in 2017, one of
my objectives has been to continue the Critical CALL agenda initiated at EUROCALL 2015 and to make research and practice of CALL for social inclusion and conflict transformation one of the association’s endeavours in the immediate future. In view of the political and humanitarian challenges Europe is currently facing, I see a need to develop critical thinking and digital literacy to support people, young people in particular, in engaging with difference. CALL as a discipline and EUROCALL as an organisation that fosters research and practice in technology-mediated
communication have an important role to play to this effect. Establishing links with
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organisations specialising in setting up, running, collecting and analysing data of virtual exchanges such as the Sharing Perspectives Foundation, Search for
Common Ground, Soliya Connect and UNICOLLABORATION have been first steps in this direction.
Projects
In the field of education, the mutual influence of research and practice is an ever-present aim. My interest in the interdependence between multimodal and intercultural communicative competence in telecollaborative teacher training is an example of this, as evidenced in Hauck (2010a; publication 9). In this area, I have been able to help influence practice through the following activities:
● Principal investigator in the TRIDEM project (reported in publications 6–8), designed and implemented during my invited secondment year-long secondment as research scholar in the Modern Languages Department at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in 2005, for which I had received funding from the British Academy.
● Co-investigator in the Integrating Telecollaborative Networks into Foreign Language Higher Education (INTENT) project which ran from 2011 until 2014. ● Co-founder, trainer and researcher for UNICollaboration: The International
Organisation of Telecollaboration and Virtual Exchange
( www.unicollaboration.org ), the main outcome of the INTENT project, which promotes the development and integration of research and practice in
telecollaboration and virtual exchange across all disciplines and subject areas in higher education internationally.
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Beneficial influence on these latter projects can be seen by the nomination of INTENT as a “success story” at the interface of research and practice by the
Directorate-General for Education and Culture of the European Commission, and by a quote from Ton Koenraad, Director of the educational training and consultancy firm TELLConsult. He points to Hauck (2007, publication 6) as “the start of the
development of a body of research that helped develop and underpin pedagogical & methodological approaches specifically for (language) learning and teaching in these new virtual, multi-user and multi-modal spaces and helped define the teacher competences involved.” He acknowledges my role as “a senior member of an expanding group of leading researchers” who has “contributed relevant insights on related topics including social presence and assessing virtual exchange (Hauck, 2010) and task design (Hauck & Warnecke, 2012)” (see Appendix 5 for full reference).
On the work we carried out together within UNICollaboration, Dr. Sauro from Malmö University writes the following (see Appendix 5 for the full reference):
Mirjam Hauck [‘s] work on social presence and assessing virtual exchange have informed my teaching and practice". Further, “[Hauck's research] on critical perspectives on teaching and learning with technology and critical digital literacies has informed my implementation and my own research. These critical perspectives have informed the design of tasks I have used as well as the type of in class mentoring and support I provide students engaging in a virtual exchange.
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Finally, my work can be seen to have benefited the field of Initial Teacher Training, a research topic that attracted EU funding in 2017. Expanding my studies in
telecollaboration, I was able to lead the research into the development of
participants’ digital-pedagogical competencies in the EVALUATE project, a European policy experimentation carried out by the INTENT consortium (see also 6.2.3). Short for Evaluating and Upscaling Telecollaborative Teacher Education, this project was indeed an 'upscale' involving 33 telecollaborative exchanges and over a thousand trainees from 52 teacher education institutions in Europe and beyond.
In EVALUATE I drew on my work on multiliteracies and digital literacies – Fuchs et al. (2012; publication 11), Kurek and Hauck (2014; publication 12) and Hauck and Kurek (2017; publication 13). I was able to show the impact of task-based training in digital literacies focusing on tools and applications and their respective modes and affordances, as put forward in publications 11 and 12 and put into practice in this project.
The following graph (Figure 17) is an example from the evaluation, which took the shape of a qualitative analysis of the teacher trainees’ reflective comments (learner diaries), coded independently by a colleague and myself and processed using NVivo, a qualitative data analysis application:
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It shows a clear increase between diary entry 2 (D2) – early on in the training – and the final diary entry (entry 4 (D4)) in the participants’ methodological use of online tools and applications after training in multimodal awareness.
Telecollaboration, increasingly referred to as virtual exchange (VE), is a long-time central interest in my research. As I experienced during my secondment at
SUNY/COIL, it is now spreading beyond language teaching in HE, to such an extent that in January 2018, the INTENT consortium sought to encourage the systematic
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mainstreaming of VE across disciplines in HE institutions in the EU and and elsewhere. In its latest project, Evidence-Validated Online Learning through Virtual Exchange, or EVOLVE, I represent the OU as co-investigator. Drawing on my most recent work (see Chapter 5), I train participating teachers in designing and delivering telecollaborative exchanges with a focus on critical digital literacy skills development.