Looking for Intercultural Competences in language teacher education in Australia and Finland

Abstract

Teacher education is crucial to supporting equitable educational outcomes and social justice in schools. In a global context of increasingly mobile and diversified school populations, pre-service teachers, and their students, need new capacities and strategies to counter racism and ethnocentric attitudes which appear to emerge in classrooms in many national contexts (Welch, 2016; Dervin, 2016). Intercultural competence has been discussed in many iterations in teacher education internationally for a number of decades. There have been many individual initiatives to devise programs in teacher education to impact pre-service teacher competences (for example, Dervin & Dirba, 2006; Jokikokko, 2005).