The Future of Education

In recent decades, many teacher education providers, particularly those in the ‘global north’, have promoted and supported international experiences, for example, a service learning project or professional experience (practicum or practice teaching) as a means of internationalising their teacher education programs, and in anticipation to value-adding to the students they will subsequently teach, by providing additional or alternative experiences overseas. Various goals exist for such programs, including: ‘conscientising’ pre-service teachers with regard to global realities such as neo-colonialism, disparities in poverty and the like; raising awareness for ‘majority-language’ pre-service teachers in terms of school children who do not speak the language of instruction; value-adding to pre-service teachers’ stock of intercultural and international/global capital and the like. Little research appears to have been undertaken, however, into the impact of such experiences on incumbents’ subsequent teaching. This project, currently in the data collection phase, proposes to address that gap by contacting, via electronic means, numbers of teachers who undertook a pre-service international experience, and to determine the breadth, length and nature of its impact on their teaching, including outcomes for their subsequent students. It is anticipated that the findings will inform teacher education providers, as well as education jurisdictions, in terms of how international experiences can value-add to returnees’ pedagogies, and how they might be leveraged to do so more effectively. IPEs incur substantial associated costs for incumbents, for universities, and for the environment. It is reasonable to undertake systematic evaluation of the outcomes of such programs. Given the potential international reach of the online survey, the data may also uncover some trends in terms of international flows of pre-service teachers between the global north and south.

Keywords: professional experience, globalisation, internationalisation, intercultural education, international experience, international exchange;