"What's your Story?" workshop promotes virtual collaboration between K-12 teachers in Brazil and the U.S.

December 15, 2023

"What's your Story?" workshop promotes virtual collaboration between K-12 teachers in Brazil and the U.S.

students showing their work
teacher and students in classroom activity

The Ohio State University Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS) and the Federal University of Paraná Teachers across Borders (TaB-UFPR) recently sponsored an international collaboration titled What’s your story: teaching and learning across culture and content.  This three-month program promoted dialogic linguistic education among undergraduate and graduate students in Languages and Education and EL K12 teachers in Brazil and the United States.  Based on the discussions of theory and methodology in the first two (virtual) sessions, participants then worked together to develop critical literacy school projects which engaged Brazilian and USA teachers and their students in intercultural interactions.

The project activities were implemented in November and early December 2023, in both synchronous and asynchronous modalities.  Project themes asked students to explore questions such as: 

  • who are the helpers in our community? - implemented across students aged 3 to 13; 
  •  who are the important people in our community? - engaging middle and high schoolers in researching biographies of both world famous and locally important unsung heroes;
  •  how do our differences as people make us stronger problem solvers? - including students who study in an alternative setting.
student writing on blue paper

In the final virtual session, five groups of participants shared the results of their teaching-learning process, presenting their projects and products and exchanging a personal story of a lesson learned.  Participants could choose to earn a 20 hour continuing education certificate from UFPR or Ohio TESOL, or they could opt for credit through Ashland University.

CLAS would like to thank the facilitators of this workshop, CLAS visiting scholar and professor at Universidade Federal do Paraná, Dr. Angela Walesko, and Teresa Troyer, President of Ohio TESOL, EL teacher in central Ohio, and graduate student at Ohio State's College of Education and Human Ecology.

This workshop was made possible thanks to CLAS' Title VI NRC funding from the US Department of Education.