Active Involvement In Our Pre-service Teachers' Overseas Teaching Experiences

Abstract

Teaching abroad has been shown to have a positive impact on pre-service teachers’ personal and professional development. Because of this, universities around the world are increasingly providing students with the opportunity to conduct teaching practicums abroad. My university’s teacher education programmes have recently gone through reforms to ensure our graduates are better prepared for their role in the local and international community. As part of these reforms, a variety of international experiential learning projects have been developed. Different from other overseas practicum experiences, these include experiential learning elements. Students are expected to explore the local contexts, identify needs, implement solutions and reflect on their solutions within the communities they work. This paper introduces an experiential learning project in a pre-service undergraduate teacher education programme at my university in which ten pre-service English language teachers and myself, their teacher educator, participated in a two-week overseas teaching experience in a primary school in Ningbo, China. I report on my experience as a novice teacher educator and the benefit I found in taking an active role in this project.