Building a virtual transnational space for initial teacher education with Australian and German students

ABSTRACT

Despite the global trend of growing diversity in student enrolment, most teacher education programmes remain inward-looking, oriented to national core standards and resist academic calls for internationalisation. While we agree that internationalisation at home is possible under certain circumstances, we put forward the argument that dialogic contact between student teachers in different national contexts has the potential to foster teacher education students’ intercultural competence and offer opportunities for professional development that go beyond those offered by traditional programmes. This paper reports on the creation of a virtual transnational ‘third place’ for teacher education students based in Hamburg and Sydney, built around the mutual analysis of their respective visual linguistic biographies. We will show that such a transnational space and reflexive activity enhances student teachers’ awareness of what it means to be and become a multilingual subject in other parts of the world, thus promoting self-awareness and the ability to decentre. Additionally, we claim that these activities have the potential to enhance teacher education students’ attitudes towards the implementation of multilingual pedagogies.

KEYWORDS:

• Decentring
• intercultural competence
• third place
• transnational space
• teacher education
• visual language biographies
• plurilingual repertoire

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the support of the MQ-FU-HAM trilateral network.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).