“Scaffolding” revisited: How TAPP collaborations support learners and instructors from different disciplines and backgrounds

In social-constructivist approaches to learning, scaffolding is “the support offered by the teacher to assist learners in the collaborative construction of their mental models” (Kiraly 2000: 45). It is not “pre-determined support” and can take a variety of forms. It is like “the placing of helpful signposts on the path as the learners create it”. It does not break down a task into components so as not to prevent learners from extracting meaning from the whole learning situation. In a collaborative project, scaffolding might also be seen as including the support that instructors offer to each other, especially when they come from different disciplines. In this paper, we provide an overview of the iterations of an online collaborative project within the Trans-Atlantic & Pacific Project (TAPP) network. In particular, we describe how over a five-year span we collaborated to re-adjust and fine-tune the project so as to learn more about each other’s discipline and cater to the learning needs of two groups of students coming from programs with different educational focuses: one group (based at the University of Trieste, Italy) comprised students from a bachelor degree program on translation; the other group (based at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, U.S.A.) comprised (mainly graduate) students from a class on international professional communication. Based on our use of collaborative autoethnography, our overview discusses: 1) the ways in which we developed and re-adjusted our scaffolding strategies; and 2) the ways in which such scaffolding and online collaboration helped us, as instructors, make better sense of the cross-disciplinary nature of the students’, and our, collaboration.