Thinking about cross-border experience in teacher education during the global pandemic

If we were to identify one positive outcome of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is the global consciousness that has emerged as a result: The world today is truly interconnected. While global interconnectedness has long been recognised for some time, the incredible speed at which the pandemic has engulfed the globe over the last 12 months has brought home the meaning of this hackneyed concept. The pandemic has given us a very tangible experience of relating to, understanding, or imagining the anxieties and sufferings of those who are located in different parts of the world. Communities now understand the need to help prevent the transmission in a given locality by wearing a facemask or washing hands, for instance. It is now imagined as part of caring for others beyond local and national communities. This emerging sense of global interconnectedness has been hampered, however, by the concurrent rise of populist nationalism, including Trumpism in the US, and the so-called “vaccine nationalism,” where the richest countries monopolise access to COVID-19 vaccines while leaving poor countries of the Global South at greater risk. COVID-19 has exposed both the promises and challenges of developing global consciousness, with many implications for teacher education. None of these concerns are new to those who work in teacher education, however. Indeed, teacher education programmes in many countries have been proactive in introducing global citizenship or global consciousness as one of the important values to be nurtured among pre-service teachers and to be taught in schools. Though these terms remain highly contested, there has emerged a policy consensus that teachers must be prepared to teach in a highly globalised reality of education and society today, where an increasing number of children come from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds, where more and more teachers are seeking employment internationally, and where many of the challenges today require local, national and global perspectives and solutions, including refugee and ecological crises and, of course, the global pandemic. It is out of this context, where teachers are positioned as part of the “solutions” to these complex challenges, that various cross-border learning, including international professional experience and service learning, are introduced as part of the core component of initial teacher education programmes today. Indeed, APJTE has recently received a large number of manuscripts focusing on such cross-border experience for pre-service and in-service teachers. Included in this issue are six such studies, undertaken in vastly different contexts and involving different nationalities, including Australia, China, Hong Kong, Japan, the Philippines and the USA. What has transpired from these studies is that “simply bringing the two parties together does not necessarily result in meaningful interactions” (Amos, 2021). Cross-border experience, either overseas professional practicum or service learning within a disadvantaged community, presumes the existence of “differences,” either cultural, socio-economic or ASIA-PACIFIC JOURNAL OF TEACHER EDUCATION 2021, VOL. 49, NO. 2, 143–147 https://doi.org/10.1080/1359866X.2021.1892325