Abstract
This article reflects on the potential that intercultural projects offer in teacher education. It reports on findings from a transnational online project on English language teaching to young learners that was implemented at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (Italy) in cooperation with the University of Meisei (Japan) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Italian and Japanese students formed mixed-nationality teams and planned English-language teaching units that they deliveredonline to children. The project intended to improve the student teachers’ practices and metacognitive skills through a participatory approach in an intercultural context. The recordings of the online interactions and students’ considerationswere examined from various theoretical perspectives, including Byram’s (2021) model for intercultural communicative competence, and knowledge-construction in the reflective and dynamic interplay with the social multicultural environment. This required adapting to the use of English as the shared language for communication during teamwork and teaching, as well as learning to work in and with international teams in problem-solving tasks.