Teacher education in a virtual exchange between Brazil and the U.S.: Balancing preservice teachers’ guidance and affording autonomy

This paper shares a virtual exchange (VE) Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) project between second language acquisition (SLA) teacher education courses at a university in the U.S. and in Brazil, developed with different groups of learners in 2022 and 2023. The main aims were to support and investigate preservice teachers’ (PSTs): 1) intercultural communicative competence (ICC), 2) language practices, 3) local and global perspectives, and 4) collaboration through information and communication technologies (ICT). This paper examines how professors balanced guidance and autonomy for PSTs as teams (each team with PSTs from Brazil and U.S.) asynchronously and synchronously engaged in informal communication and projects to study international and regional cultural norms for SLA. Qualitative analyses of surveys, interactions, and projects informed patterns of PST autonomy and situations that required more professor support and guidance. Most PSTs engaged consistently, thoroughly, and needed almost no support with tasks, such as their introductions and responses to questions about readings. Some PSTs needed more guidance from professors, such as one-one scaffolding (in-person or Zoom) or text message reminders, than others for arranging open-ended tasks among teams of PSTs and setting up relevant ICT, such as WhatsApp groups to facilitate desired communications. Results were utilized to determine modifications for future VE.