Internationalisation and Diversity in Preschool Teacher Education: Representations in Preschool Student Teachers’ Projects

Abstract

Internationalisation of higher education has been a top priority in many countries for decades, yet teacher education programmes in Sweden have lower number of exchange students. This is predominantly ascribed to the Swedish national context of education and to the lack of conceptualisation of internationalisation and diversity among teacher educators in Sweden. The need to address issues of internationalisation and diversity is reinforced by the fact that many societies today are heterogeneous with high levels of linguistic and cultural diversity. This study examines conceptualisations of internationalisation and diversity in preschool teacher education at one Swedish university. Drawing from Stephen Ball’s writings on policy as text and policy as discourse, student preschool teachers are simultaneously regarded as policy workers that act upon policy and as subjects constructed by the same policy. Through 26 preschool student teachers’ undergraduate degree projects, the question “What is the problem represented to be?” is used to explore the projects. The results show that the projects reproduce prevailing discourses of internationalisation and diversity from content, literature, and policy. The findings show that to develop students’ conceptualisations of internationalisation and diversity, a reconceptualisation of the purposes and means of internationalisation in preschool teacher education is needed.