ABSTRACT
As boundaries begin to blur in this transnational world, creating authentic contexts for our teacher-candidates to learn about ELT within transnational contexts has become increasingly important for the depth of learning it affords. In this chapter, I present our work in developing and teaching an online Business English program for Kenyan youth, who were part of a non-profit organization with a mission to help at-risk youth escape poverty through the provision of professional development opportunities. Through the process of engaging in this transnational context, our teacher-candidates became more cognizant of the conceptual and pedagogical understandings of the historical, political, economic, and social influences impacting the process of language teaching and learning within this context. Preparing our teacher-candidates to teach within this transnational context allowed for critical conversations around power, language hierarchies, ownership of English, and post-colonial, post-method, and post-structural perspectives on language teaching. It also provided a space for our teacher-candidates to continually examine and negotiate their positionality and identity as English teachers within this transnational context. Through this study, three competencies emerged as critical competencies for teacher education programs to consider, namely critical reflexivity competence, transnational competence, and metacultural competence.
