Global north-south telecollaboration: promoting a critical mindset, or “just making day-dreams”?

Telecollaboration can enhance language skills and promote intercultural understanding, but university-level links between students in the Global North and the Global South are still rare, despite significant connectivity gains in the Global South, and despite the range of skills and experience that Global South students possess. This paper presents a pre-sessional EAP course between engineering students in Scotland and Gaza in which telecollaborative project-work forms the core. It suggests that such project-work can engender authentic forms of communication, providing opportunities for developing what Barnett (2007) terms a “space-for-being” among participants, and raise awareness of global inequality. The paper concludes that the widespread move to online EAP delivery since 2020 might be seen not only as a pedagogic challenge, but also as an opportunity to develop a “critical EAP” (Benesch, 2001). This would be of value to the students who are able to attend pre-sessional courses in the Global North and to the students in the Global South who are normally unable to attend such courses. It could contribute more broadly, too, to the creation of an HE system based on principles of fairness and inclusion. However, it also notes that further work is needed to ensure that Global South students feel willing to make their voices heard, one crucial element of authenticity that is still lacking.