Internationalization of Teacher Education

Dear Colleagues,

Historically, many education systems are rooted in a monocultural and monolingual paradigm. Indeed, they were built on the idea that the school could be a tool to train national citizens and thus consolidate the nation. Today, if the school has opened, its roots remain present, as can be seen in particular when the curriculum evokes questions of citizenship.

However, international migrations and globalization are two phenomena that have particularly destabilized the school. Migration has called into question the monoculturality and monolingualism of schools; globalization has confronted the school—which was set up to break away from the world to enable learning—with a multitude of influences and issues. Indeed, globalization has been the source of new interdependencies, new relationships to knowledge, new inequalities, and new forms of citizenship. Schools are, therefore, at the heart of a twofold problem: to take hold of these issues and prepare students for addressing them.

As a result, teacher education is directly affected by the new questions raised by international migrations and globalization.

Since the 1960s, in several countries, international migrations or issues related to cultural diversity have had a growing place in schools: inter and multicultural approaches have had their peak, their detractors, and have led to better recognition of cultural and linguistic minorities. However, international migrations continue to enrich as well as to question the school; new migrations always question the capacity of educational systems to consider the difference. As for globalization, it seems to be a phenomenon that has been considered more recently in schools: the modification of curricula to deal with issues of sustainability and social justice, highlighting the concept of global citizenship on an international scale, initiatives to promote the epistemologies of the South, etc. There are many initiatives driven by globalization.

As teachers are key players in school transformations, these new issues cannot be addressed without them. For this reason, equipping them and preparing them to deal with new issues is particularly important. Here again, the literature shows that initiatives are emerging in this direction. We then raise the question of the internationalization of teacher training: to what extent does training take into account the transformation of the world in which they will have to teach? How does training prepare teachers for new themes such as global citizenship? How are teachers' intercultural competencies strengthened with regard to the evolution of students?

We know today that some institutions require future teachers (as soon as they are selected) to undertake international mobility or to master different languages; that intercultural issues are considered (despite various criticisms concerning their place in the curriculum, which is considered too minimal); that linguistic diversity is also the subject of several courses.

In this issue, we would like to take a further step in understanding the internationalization of teacher training. First, by including contributions from different parts of the world, we will better understand how globalization influences the teaching profession and how teacher training institutions are addressing these issues. Second, we will propose various objects of analysis such as: global citizenship, sustainability, international mobility, north–south partnerships. Third, we will try to understand to what extent the internationalization of teacher training contributes to the improvement of teachers' competencies.

The prospective themes are:

• North–south mobility in teacher education.
• Decolonization of internationalization.
• Global citizenship in teacher education.
• Internationalization through south–north research partnership.
• The role of ICT and interculturality in teacher internationalization.

Prof. Dr. Abdeljalil Akkari
Dr. Myriam Radhouane
Guest Editors

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• teacher education
• internationalization
• global citizenship education
• teacher mobility
• ICT
• intercultural education
• international education