Seeking the cosmopolitan teacher: internationalising curricula in a Canadian preservice teacher education program

ABSTRACT

This paper takes the trans-nationalising conditions of global mobilities, hyper-connectivity and super-diversity as bases for the internationalisation of teacher education (ITE) curricula and for ‘seeking the cosmopolitan teacher.’ We ground our conception of the cosmopolitan teacher in one novel Canadian exemplar of ITE in which we participate as curriculum developers and teacher educators. In the literature on ITE we find an overlapping set of rationales for, and notions of, the cosmopolitan teacher that link up to our own ITE context. However, still sparse in the literature are details on ITE curricula, which is our primary focus in the presentation of our exemplar. Our seeking the development of the cosmopolitan teacher aligns with the concept of ‘cosmopolitan learning’ (CL), which aims to deepen learners’ critical reflexivities of their situatedness within historically produced global interdependencies. Our paper illustrates how our ITE curricula provoke the ‘epistemic virtues’ of CL, to support further inquiries into ITE curricula and teaching, as a more pro-active, education-focused internationalisation.

KEYWORDS:

• Cosmopolitan learning
• epistemic virtues
• internationalising curricula
• internationalising teacher education
• reflexivity

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. We acknowledge Allan Luke, in his similar call (2004) for a cosmopolitan teacher ‘with the capacity to shunt between the local and the global, to explicate and engage with the broad flows of knowledge and information, technologies and populations, artefacts and practices that characterise the present historical moment’ (p. 1438–1439); Luke’s focus is more on ‘cosmopolitanising’ teacher’s work and collaborations and our focus is more on ‘cosmopolitanising’ teacher learning.

2. Teacher mobility is another example of the uneven-ness of flows under globalisation. While Canadian teachers are eagerly recruited by international schools in many parts of the world, internationally certified teachers coming into Canada face significant challenges in finding employment (Schmidt, 2010) despite the calls for internationalising education.

3. More cynically, despite our progressive or critical perspectives on what IHE is or should be (well captured in IHE research on stakeholder perceptions that in turn fulfill Knight’s inclusive and politically flattened definition), in our common practices as institutional subjects enrolled in internationalisation from above, internationalisation, materially, may have very little to do with the educational ideals often included in its rhetoric.

4. Because of the Anglo-Western-centredness of the ITE literature reviewed and our own ITE exemplar’s location in the Anglo-West, ‘home’ and ‘abroad’ are admittedly not neutral but embedded on the architecture of asymmetric North-South relations. Teaching abroad for Anglo-Western teachers is afforded by the hegemony of English and a hierarchy of Englishes. ‘Home’ in this paper refers to multicultural school dynamics in pluralistic societies.

5. See, Cushner and Dowdy (2014) for one edited collection that does discuss curricular frameworks, activities and strategies for ‘social awareness’ in teacher education classes, in the related areas (to international education) of social studies and social foundations.

6. Some follow-up research into how this ITE curricular intervention is experienced by students and how (well) it serves students in their future teaching assignments would be admittedly helpful to inform our ongoing ITE pedagogical practices.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by a Faculty Research Development Fund grant, Faculty of Education, Western University.