Outside in: learning from an international professional experience program

This chapter explores the experiences of a group of 13 Australian pre-service teachers (all female) and their academic leaders on a three-week international professional experience program in Johannesburg, South Africa. The placement occurred across three different schools with each pre-service teacher in two of these schools, ensuring that they experienced contrasting educational and cultural spaces over the course of the three weeks. The authors (both teacher educators from Monash University in Australia, who were actually born in South Africa) present a series of short reflective cases of three of the pre-service teachers, and we discuss the significant learning and development of these students as a result of their three weeks in South Africa. These cases illuminate how the Australian pre-service teachers journeyed outside the familiarity of their ‘home’ country to be in South Africa and proceeded to dance between what they perceived as the sameness of the two countries and the differences between them. This choreography appears to have prompted the students to reflect closely on their own practice, to re-consider their identity and place in the world of teaching, and to come to understand the tensions that intersect in their desires to make a difference.