Educating the Global Citizen LMU Munich 25-28 March 2019 Juggling Selves: Navigating Pre-service Teaching Experiences in Overseas Contexts

Global mobility programs for pre-service teachers are an increasingly integral component of many teacher education courses. Research into international teaching programs has shown that student teachers develop intercultural awareness, inclusive teaching practices and flexibility, but global mobility programs can also reinforce cultural stereotypes, neocolonial attitudes and a sense of superiority and entitlement. This chapter presents a comparative analysis of pre-service teachers’ experiences in two mobility programs—a German program undertaken in Laos, and an Australian program in Chile. Such a comparison has two aims: first, to explore and add to current understandings of transnationalism; second, to examine how binary categories of self and other, which are historically constructed and discursively produced, continue to shape intercultural encounters. From this arises the need to support pre-service teachers in finding new ways to engage with the complexity of their experiences, which may lead to a deeper questioning of their identities and the normative conditions that shape their understanding.

I love adventure and walking around the streets. Like learning different flavours, like talking to different people. I walked to the park and the circus is there, and we joined them tight-roping. Little experiences like that that you just wouldn't get anywhere-not in the suburbs in Melbourne. They don't know English and you don't know Spanish, but you somehow conjure up a conversation; they were teaching us juggling and we didn't know [Spanish]-you just learn [in] different ways. Global mobility programs for pre-service teachers are an increasingly integral component of many teacher education courses.
• Such programs are perceived as important opportunities for pre-service teachers to engage with diversity and to develop skills to respond to increasingly multicultural and multilingual classrooms.
• Much research has shown the effects of mobility programs on transnational competencies, and has investigated the impact of international field experiences on (pre-service) teachers' identities (Block 2007;Ellwood 2011;Kinginger 2013;Porsch and Lüling 2017).

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• Research into international teaching practicums has shown that student teachers develop intercultural awareness, inclusive teaching practices and flexibility, • BUT: global mobility programs can also reinforce cultural stereotypes, neo-colonial attitudes and a sense of superiority and entitlement.
• Our study explores the ways in which students articulated intercultural professional encounters, to gain a better understanding of how renegotiation of self and other may or may not take place, and of the underpinning ideologies that shape such encounters.

Mobility in Teacher Education cont.
Our comparative study draws on two mobility programs for preservice teachers: an Australian program in Santiago, Chile (Deakin University), and a German program in Laos (PH Karlsruhe).

The Australian program:
• Established in 2017, in cooperation with a university in Santiago • 'Global Education Program' (duration of 3 weeks, i.e. 15 school placement days; for Bachelor of Primary Education students and BA/BTeach students) • Around half the Australian group was also enrolled in an elective course unit designed with GEPs in mind: 'Teaching in a Global World'. The German program: • 'The Laos Experience: Bi-directional learning and teaching' was established in 2015 by Karlsruhe University of Education (Pädagogische Hochschule Karlsruhe and the German foundation Angels for Children.
• Program runs twice yearly, for two months.
• Bi-directional program in which German students and graduates work in tandem with Lao teacher-partners, with the aim of supporting and improving teacher education in Laos, especially in English, Physics, Chemistry, Biology and Mathematics.
• No common language at the outset, as English language proficiency is generally low (A1-A2), or non-existent, among the Lao teachers. Communication initially takes place through gesture, lesson modelling-even via Google Translate.
The programs cont. 6 • A process that 'emerges from efforts to create order and make retrospective sense of what occurs' (Weick 1993: 635) • A mechanism to explore and better understand how (preservice) teachers make sense of their profession, social and political school contexts, and of the various factors that contribute to their becoming teachers.
• Kelchtermans (2009) Personal Interpretive Framework (PIF) analysis tool attempts to capture how teachers interpret the complexity of their role and how they position themselves.

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Making sense of the unfamiliar: environmental, cultural and language-related aspects, school and classroom contexts, interactions with local students and teachers.
Making sense of the overall experience: end-of-program reflections on 'take home' elements of the program, which include professional and (inter)cultural and personal aspects; reflections from a returning-home perspective.
Making sense of self: reflections on how and in what ways the program was able to transform pre-service teachers' sense of identity.
The necessity of interrogating and shifting the binaries is still present in postcolonial perspectives; such re-theorisation is key in resuming the tasks of the intellectual and subjective task of decolonisation (Chen, 2010).
Transnational, transcultural pedagogical programs create a powerful space for neo-colonial preconceptions to be set against moments of discovery unveiling the limitations of established parameters that define our sense of self within 'imagined communities' (Anderson, 1991).
When teachers 'are adequately prepared to examine their worlds critically , they are in a better position to advocate for their students and to teach their students to advocate for themselves' (Motha, 2014).
• Fifteen third-year Australian pre-service teachers in their early twenties from Deakin University, participating in the Santiago GEP.
• Three focus groups of approximately one hour were held in the final week of the program with the two accompanying academic coordinators.
• For the Laos program, data were collected through individual interviews across two groups: returnees (7) and outgoing participants (10).
• Data from 43 written final reports since 2015 and previous weekly reports describing program and tandem experiences were also selected for analysis.

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The participants were of different ages (20-28 years old) and at different stages of study. • Developing teacher expertise that is well placed to respond to the diversity of globalised classrooms involves complex engagement and reconfiguration of identity, pedagogy and practice in contexts shaped by different economic, social, and political relations.
• This has implications for the design of global mobility programs and the role of supporting courses, units, seminars and academic coordinators, whose role implies bridging the gap between 'the familiar' and 'the unfamiliar' • Reimaginations of geographical and cultural conceptions within global mobility programs need to question our responsibilities as members of new 'places'.
• Such questions have been asked before, but as these programs are situated within continually re-forming discourses of globalisation, they may therefore require new answers.