Our presentation focuses on the benefits and challenges of an international multidisciplinary research collaboration (Dusdal & Powell 2021) an Erasmus+ Key Action 2 program entitled “GlobalSense: Developing Global Sensitivity among Student-Teachers (in short, GlobalSense).” Our research group is multi-national, including members from Nantes University (France), Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel), Weingarten University of Education (Germany), Free University of Brussels (Belgium) and Temple University of Philadelphia (USA).  It is also multi-disciplinary in its nature, bringing together experts in sociology, civic education, global education, and learning sciences. 

The research question that led the study this presentation is based on is : What are the organizational, communicative and conceptual challenges faced by an international and multidisciplinary team when working together on a politically, socially and culturally loaded topic such as global citizenship education?

Background- The objective of GlobalSense is to enable future teachers to develop their understanding of global citizenship and enhance their pedagogical practices resulting from cross-national online interactions among future educators. The theoretical premise underlying this work was that (a) preparing teachers to promote global citizenship requires them to engage with socially and politically loaded subjects in a global context; (b). Since each nation has a unique history and context the encounter with student-teachers from different countries has a learning potential; and (c) Teachers’ training cannot be limited to the transmission of academic knowledge alone but should include the development of a pedagogical awareness of and sensitivity (Hansen, 2010).

Theoretical background - As early as in the 1980s scholars attempted to point to the motivations and costs of collaboration in research (Fox & Faver 1984). The collaboration in the case of the GlobalSense project is motivated by indirect benefit concerning external goals of a political, economic or cultural nature as well as direct benefits that enable addressing transnational or global problems (Georghiou 1998:620-622) such as Global Citizenship education.  The impact of context being political, ethical and economical can affect the research process. First of all, language differences complicate aspects of a collaborative study.  Diverse cultural settings present unique challenges in multinational collaboration (Hooper et al. 2005 in Freshwater et al 2006) and more evidently in social research focused on politically loaded issues such as the GlobalSense project. Dusdal & Powell’s (2021) qualitative comprehensive study found that among the benefits of scientific collaboration, interviewees mentioned: Broadening knowledge, conducting comparative research, multidisciplinarity advances thinking and facilitates development of theoretical approaches and methods, etc . The motivations could be career advancement, networking and time to do multidisciplinary work among others. The challenges researchers faced:  Organization and structured management of work packages and tasks, team communications and language skills, contrasting cultural and organizational expectations and norms, contrasting styles of communication (exchange of information) and work, diverse theoretical and methodological strengths and weaknesses and so on (Dusdal & Powell 2021). Regarding organizational challenges, though much of the work related to international research collaboration can be accomplished by email, telephone conference and video-conference, the literature emphasises the importance of face-to-face meetings (Hooper et al., 2005 in Freshwater et al 2006). The role of diversity and respect can be accommodating differences in order to facilitate a consensus approach to decision-making (Freshwater et al 2006). 

From the beginning, tensions and misunderstanding between the members of the team from different countries and disciplines were evident in the first online general meetings. Since scholars constituted a multinational and multidisciplinary team, the French team thought that these tensions and gaps can by themselves be considered an interesting topic of study which were not part of the initial ERASMUS research proposal. For this purpose, the French team developed three different tools in order to analyze the multiple challenges presented by a collaborative multinational, multicultural and multidisciplinary team while working together on a cultural and socio-political loaded project such as the one regarding global citizenship education. Questionnaire on wonderings. Members of the team were asked to fill a questionnaire with open questions. The first item was to “Describe what made you wonder or react in the Globalsense project. “ and the following items were in the same direction trying to understand and provide interpretations on wonderings that are usually products of cultural or disciplinary differences. Reflections collected immediately after the online students exchange. These reflections targeted specifically to register leaders’ impressions on the students’ exchanges, impressions not being considered by the research design and aimed at collecting information on how the leaders felt about the exchanges and what were the challenges they underwent. Focused interviews were conducted in person with members of the team from different countries mainly during the transnational meetings at one of the participant universities. Interviews focused on questions of cultural differences, cultural gaps scholars perceived during the online and in person preparation meetings in their encounters with scholars from other countries. The data obtained from these three sources will be interpreted based on a thematic content analysis in order to understand the main challenges a multinational research team is confronted with when working together.

As we experienced, leading a multi-disciplinary, international project presented both technical and substantive challenges for the research team. These included: 1. Technical Issues: Coordinating meetings across three continents was difficult due to time differences, making it challenging to schedule international collaborative learning sessions. 2. Linguistic and Cultural Differences: There was a need to design pedagogical activities that were culturally sensitive and relevant across five different national and cultural contexts. 3. Evaluation: Developing a framework for evaluating and analyzing students' learning and overall experiences from the project was a complex task. 4. Different Education Systems: The challenge lay in formulating practical recommendations that were relevant and applicable across diverse educational systems. Other challenges (e.g., timing student visits from one university to another and planning a meaningful experience for them) can be classified into one or more of the above four categories. We also experienced unexpected obstacles that we had to address (Covid-19, war, and so forth). The study shows that we had learned a lot from this collaborative experience and that our own collaborative skills evolved. The analysis will shed light on the processes we underwent and detect factors that hindered or leveraged our collaborative work. One of the unexpected results is that when working collaboratively cross-nationally on a teacher education project, not only students' global sensitivity improves, but ours as well.

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