Diverse Internationalisation of Teacher Education

Teacher Education in universities has remained one of the least internationalised subjects in higher education. Yet, teachers are expected to educate future generations to become global citizens. In other words, students of teacher education are so far ill-equipped to transform their prospective pupils into individuals with a global mindset. DITE focuses on the element of internationalisation to increase capabilities of future teachers by sensitising TE students to international perspectives. The mobility is not the solution if we want a large percentage of students (90%+) to be reached by internationalisation. Therefore, DITE relies on internationalisation at home to develop a model of globalised teacher education through diverse internationalisation with a focus on students becoming teachers. IaH allows us to include more individuals especially those for whom mobility would not be an option for different reasons. DITE improves key competences: Better understanding of international/global interconnectedness, understanding of how concepts and problems are intertwined across national borders, by actively engaging with individuals in other countries.

The ultimate goal was to create a transferable DITE model that can be used in different countries and institutions. The DITE model aims at implementing international components into teacher education and improve comptencces of the (future) teachers. The project team did the following to achieve it: we learnt about the status quo of the internationalisation of teacher education. Gathered information became a basis for the series of trainings for the teacher educators at our HEIs and for teacher education students. Thanks to thorough impact assessment we were able to present a model and guidelines for implementing DITE in other insitutions. To build on dissemination efforts and ensure long-term sustainability of the project, we created a DITE network for organziations and individuals from within and outside project consortium. By understanding international and diverse perspectives, DITE aims to innovate students and teachers approach to the complexity of the major social challenges and also provide ways to improve the teaching with respect to these aspects.

The DITE project team created following outputs that are open to general public at https://dite.usz.edu.pl/results/: 1. A report on internationalisation of teacher education including a brief literature review, research at the partner universities and description of the legal framework of teacher education in Poland, Portugal and Spain. 2. A DITE trainer’s manual focused on implementing international perspectives into teacher education 3. Train-the-Trainer workshops for teacher educators from 4 European universities 4. 5 local versions of DITE trainer’s manual for teacher education students 5. 4 local DITE in-house trainings for teacher education students 6. Impact assessment report 7. The DITE model with guidelines 8. The DITE network https://dite.usz.edu.pl/network/ 9. Online repository of the activities similar to DITE approach https://dite.usz.edu.pl/network/