ABSTRACT
Teachers who participate in learning and teaching abroad enhance their intercultural competence, develop more globally-informed and critical perspectives on education, and improve their foreign language and teaching skills. If an essential component of teacher development is to promote a more global, and critical understanding of schooling, one of the less common, yet potent ways to enhance teachers’ empathy is through study-abroad. Mutual benefit and sensitivity towards “helping” versus truly partnering, especially with Global North teachers traveling to Global South contexts, is a critical future direction for programing. Second, Bauler, Wang, and Thornburg offer up a menu of possible ways to bring internationalism to the local campus. Hilliker, Loranc-Paszylk, and Lenkaitis describe a direct and consistent video conferencing exchange program between teachers of English in the United States and Poland. Such study “abroad” experiences that are domestic but can expose teachers to culturally, linguistically, ethnically, and socially diverse communities may be one of the most important new directions for this work.
