‘If I’m going to teach about the world, I need to know the world’: developing Australian pre-service teachers’ intercultural competence through international trips

Abstract

Increasingly, there is an imperative to prepare teachers who can address the needs of ethnically and racially diverse learners. One way to do so is to make available to pre-service teachers opportunities for an international experience so that they might learn about the world and develop better understandings of cultural diversity and difference. In this article, I draw on the findings of a qualitative study that aimed to investigate pre-service teachers’ perceptions of the value of an international experience to their development as teachers. I present excerpts of interview data that highlight how fourteen Australian pre-service teachers who went to India to live and teach for a month, made sense of their experiences. Findings raise concerns about how they saw the trip primarily as an opportunity for tourism and how it became a vehicle through which postcolonial and neocolonial views were developed and maintained. I conclude by making recommendations for teacher education as well as for the organisation of the trip.

Keywords:

• international programmes
• teacher education
• postcolonialism
• culturally responsive teachers
• ethnicity

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the pre-service teachers who generously gave their time to be interviewed for the study, and the support of the other research team member, Dr Jae Major.

Notes

1. These can take a variety of forms such as exchange programmes for up to one year, short-term study programmes, credit-bearing and non-credit bearing units of work, programmes with varying levels of supervision, programmes involving teaching practice in schools overseas.

2. All names are pseudonyms.