Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Yükseköğretim Kurumları Destekli Proje, 2024 - 2024
Driven by the acceleration of the positive psychology movement (MacIntyre et al., 2016) in the field of applied linguistics, and in line with the calls for a greater focus on language teacher psychology (Mercer, 2018), the last few years have seen a growing number of studies that investigate aspects of pre- and in-service language teacher well-being (e.g., Gregersen et al., 2020; Hofstadler et al., 2021; Mercer, 2020; Shin et al., 2021; Sulis et al., 2021). This scholarly interest is motivated by the premise that
well-being helps teachers excel in their personal and professional lives (Mercer & Gregersen, 2020). The current scholarship reflects an increasing attention to the affordances and constraints toward language teacher well-being at the personal, relational, institutional, and national levels (e.g., Babic et al., 2022; Mercer, 2020; Sulis et al., 2022). However, we know little about the experiences of well-being in technology-mediated environments because of an overall focus on the participants’ in-person experiences rather than their experiences in digital spaces (for some discussion, see MacIntyre et al., 2020; Sulis et al., 2021). With this in mind and given the need for examining how teacher well-being is shaped “across diverse settings and contexts” (Mercer, 2021, p. 20), the present project will use an ecological lens to explore the factors affecting pre-service language teacher well-being in the context of a 3-week telecollaboration (also known as virtual exchange and online intercultural exchange; O'Dowd, 2018) between two groups of trainee English teachers in Turkey and Poland. 2nd-grade trainee teachers enrolled in the English Language Education (ELE) program at TED University and 3rd-grade prospective teachers from the Department of English Studies at the University of Bielsko-Biala will work in mixed-nationality groups to complete three different tasks using a variety of online tools. Drawing on data from guided task reflections and semi-structured interviews, we aim to unpack the personal, social, and contextual factors the participants feel promote or threaten their well-being in the shared virtual space. Such knowledge would likely contribute to our understanding of the benefits and challenges of telecollaboration from a psychological perspective and offer implications for the design of more engaging projects for the participants