A Case Study into Turkish EFL Pre-Service Teachers’ CALL-Mediated Professional Development for Global Citizenship Education Through Inclusive Webquest Task Design

Abstract

Being inquiry-oriented and socio-constructivist, webquests offer experiential project-based learning opportunities for 21st century inquiry-oriented EFL pre-service teachers' professsional development via collaborative knowledge construction and peer scaffolding. As comtemporary EFL teachers need to address culturally and linguistically diverse learner profiles, they need to raise their awareness of how to incorporate global citizenship elements into their future teaching contexts and align their curricula accordingly to foster inclusive classroom practices. The current eight-week exploratory case study focused on 19 EFL pre-service teachers' insights into the impact of a Webquest project integration related to global citizenship education into K-12 curricula on students and the impact of their collaborative Webquest design experience on their professional development in online elective course called World Englishes and Culture at the foreign language education department of a Turkish state university. The data were collected via online pre-service teacher reflections, and semi-structured interviews and were analysed via thematic analysis. Findings indicated pre-service teachers' self-reported gains regarding pedagogical and digital competencies regarding the creation of online collaborative, differentiated tasks aligned with global citizenship for diverse learner profiles, as well as their favourable insights into the integration of Webquests into K-12 curricula as a catalyst to foster a global mindset.