On Enhancement of a Teacher’s Intercultural Competence via a Mobility Term

Abstract

Fast shifts in the Bologna process leading towards the establishment of a coherent and cohesive European higher education area (EHEA) have initiated many European tertiary institutions to pool their academic resources and cultural traditions together in order to promote the development of integrated study programmes and joint degrees. To meet the challenges of EHEA, eight European teacher training institutions have reshaped the already existing MA teacher training study programmes into a joint one, entitled “European Master for European Teacher Training” (EMETT), and integrated two extra core areas related to Intercultural Studies and Multilingualism to be implemented via a mobility term. The authors of the paper, members of EMETT designers’ group, focus on the teachers’ intercultural communicative competence, necessary for studying and practicing abroad. The target competence enables the mobility participants to cope with their own cultural backgrounds in interaction with the others.

This paper juxtaposes the theoretical perspective on an interculturally competent European teacher to be trained via a mobility term with the current student teachers’ attitudes towards the importance of the development of mobile European teachers to be trained and educated for practicing in the international context. The theoretical assumptions are followed by the data analysis of the diagnostic survey carried out by the EMETT design team at eight European universities to learn student teachers’ attitudes towards a study period abroad, highlighting the attitude differences between such sample groups as student teachers of languages vs student teachers of other subjects, East Europeans vs West Europeans, Lithuanians vs representatives of other EU nationalities.

http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.sal.0.19.957