Introduction

This collection, Narratives of Learning from International Professional Experience, presents a variety of perspectives and experiences of learning about teaching and learning during professional experience (or practicum), in a range of global contexts. It is timely to explore this dimension of teacher education, and the personal and professional learning gained by pre-service teachers, their university and school-based mentors and host communities, as such programs are becoming increasingly popular in many universities. International teaching practicums in one form or another have been part of teacher education courses across the world since the 1970s (Cantalini-Williams et al. 2014; Parr and Chan 2015). In recent years, as researchers and policy-makers have developed a greater appreciation for globalising trends across the world, governments have talked more about increased global integration and international mobility in higher education, if they are to educate the next generation of citizens for better understanding and working with diversity and difference.

The scale of developments in this area can be seen in the growing numbers of students involved in international mobility experiences. A recent OECD (2015) report states that five million higher education students studied outside their home country during 2012/13, and that there has been a tripling of international enrolments in higher education between 1990 and 2013. These figures are the result of governments actively and strategically promoting international student mobility—in the form of inbound mobility experiences (i.e. international students travelling to a host country for some form of study or work-integrated learning) and outbound mobility programs (i.e. students travelling abroad to study or engage in work-integrated learning programs, amongst which teaching practicums are just one example). At the same time, higher education institutions have sought to gain greater market share in the international education marketplace by offering prospective students an internationalised curriculum that enhances the employability of individual students (De Wit et al. 2015).

In the field of teacher education, international (OECD 2010) and national reports (e.g. Mayer et al. 2014) have argued that there is an urgent need to better prepare the next generation of teachers to meet the needs of diverse student cohorts in multicultural schools. And so, along with the development of professional teaching standards that require teachers to ‘nurture an appreciation of and respect for social, cultural, and religious diversity, and a sense of global citizenship’ (MCEECDYA 2011, p. 4), interest has grown in formalized international professional experience (practicum) programs (see Quezada 2010). Along with this interest has come a body of research into international professional experience that investigates the benefits for pre-service students as they engage with unfamiliar cultures, curricula and practices in the process of learning and developing as teachers. A more recent development has been a body of research examining the work and identity of teacher educators who design the curriculum for these programs and/or who mentor the pre-service teachers before, during and after their practicum experience in an international setting (Parr 2012; Williams and Grierson 2016). The narratives contained in this collection contribute to this increasing body of research, and explore the professional learning of participants in one particular IPE program based in Melbourne, Australia, which was developed by the Monash University Faculty of Education.

An Overview of the Monash University Faculty of Education International Professional Experience Program

Monash University’s International Professional Experience (IPE) program, on which this collection is based, supports pre-service teachers to participate in a 15-day teaching placement abroad as part of their education course. During this time, they are continuing their journey of learning to teach alongside local teachers who are their mentors. Usually, staff from the Faculty of Education are also present in country to support this learning experience, and to provide guidance as the pre-service teachers navigate new and unfamiliar professional and personal contexts. This experience diversifies their teaching, develops their capacities as globally minded citizens and engages them with local cultures through meaningful relationships developed in schools, with students and communities. The host locations are early childhood settings, primary and secondary schools, currently in 11 countries—China, Cook Islands, Hong Kong, India, Israel, Italy, Malaysia, Nepal, South Africa, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates—hosting approximately 180 pre-service teachers annually. School-based professional experiences are fundamental to any pre-service teacher education qualification. Through the IPE program, Monash University Faculty of Education is able to develop students as lifelong learners and career-ready professionals, who are equipped with an education that is both translational and transportable to a range of teaching contexts, both at home and abroad. This expands their abilities to respond to cultural diversity as graduate professionals, and optimises their employability. For many, it transforms their ways of seeing education and their identity as a teacher.

Research and Learning Through Narrative Inquiry

The professional learning of participants in the various IPEs showcased in this book is presented through the lens of narrative inquiry, but what do we mean by the term narrative? Narrative inquiry is a methodological approach that is increasingly used in qualitative research to uncover and unpack the lived experiences of people in a diverse range of educational and other contexts. This methodological approach utilises stories in the form of written, spoken and/or visual accounts of experience, which may form the collection of data, the presentation of research findings or both. Researchers collect and examine the storied experience of participants, then present these experiences in the form of a story or ‘plot line’ (Creswell 2013, p. 54). Alternatively, the participants themselves recall and document their experiences in narrative form, thereby becoming researchers in the process. Whichever approach is adopted, an essential element of narrative inquiry is its embeddedness in the social, political, cultural and temporal contexts in which the participants live. Clandinin and Connelly (2000) stated that ‘narrative inquiry is a way of understanding experience. It is a collaboration between researcher and participants, over time, in a place or series of places, and in social interaction with milieus…Narrative inquiry is stories lived and told’ (p. 20). They argued that narrative inquiry embraces three essential elements—personal and social interaction; a sense of time: past, present and future; and place. Each of the narratives contained in this collection draws on these three fundamental elements in some way. They include stories about people involved in IPE living, working and learning together, over time, and in particular geographic and cultural spaces. The ways in which the data and chapters are presented may differ in their narrative forms, but each author has utilised storying of experience in ways that take the reader into their world to better understand the complexities, challenges and rewards of working and learning in IPE.

From Placement to Program—Evolution of the IPE Program

The Monash University Faculty of Education IPE program has evolved over a number of years, and has involved numerous academic and professional staff, pre-service teachers and host schools. The following narratives have been written by us, the three editors, to provide an insight into the evolution of this program over the past 10 years or so. As academics experienced in developing and leading IPEs in different parts of the world, the narratives constructed by Graham, Judy and Ange illustrate the development of this program, beginning with the tentative first steps to establish one of the Faculty’s pioneering IPEs in South Africa, to its position in 2016 as a University award-winning program.

Graham—Dreaming of a New International Practicum

In June 2009, our Faculty of Education had been managing just two short-term international teaching practicums for pre-service teacher education students—in The Cook Islands and in South Korea. Monash University’s strategic plan spoke about deepening its transnational partnership with the recently established Monash South Africa. For its part, the Faculty of Education in Australia was considering short-term international practicums, as a way to help develop the skills and experiences necessary for its graduates to teach in multicultural settings. In this combination of circumstances, I dreamed of setting up and coordinating a new teaching practicum for our pre-service teacher education students in Johannesburg, South Africa. In September of that year, after a whirlwind three months of planning (including hundreds of emails, and Skype conversations with Craig Rowe, Manager of Community Engagement at MSA), the dream became reality. Nine carefully selected pre-service students and I were waiting for a bus beside the disconcertingly high security gates of Monash South Africa MSA, speculating about what lay ahead in this pilot three-week practicum. Numerous interviews and cultural orientation workshops in Australia had prepared us for a city of dramatic and sometimes disturbing cultural contrasts….

On leaving the imposing sandstone buildings of MSA, our bus passed tiny roadside fruit and vegetable ‘stalls’ hastily constructed from rocks from dusty nearby fields. 200 metres later, these makeshift stalls were suddenly replaced by a lavishly resourced, multi-storeyed independent school situated, again, behind high security gates and armed guards. Some students took particular notice; they would be teaching at that school. Minutes later, we were driving on the outskirts of an enormous informal settlement housing 60,000 adults and children in hastily constructed ‘informal’ dwellings. There was time for a quick look into a primary school squeezed behind barbed-wire topped concrete walls within this settlement, a school where some of our students would be teaching in future practicums. Soon, we were driving through acres of manicured sporting grounds towards the carefully tended gardens of another well-resourced independent school, where other students would be placed. And so on.

The inequities in sociocultural and educational settings within just a couple of kilometres left us all breathless. At the end of the first day of that first South African practicum, we were all excited to ensure that this practicum would be valuable for us as visitors, for our South African educational hosts and their student learners. And we were determined that this would lead to further South African practicums into the future. But we were under no illusions. We would all (pre-service students and teacher educator mentor alike) be challenged in ways that no previous educational experience had ever challenged us. We were not mistaken.

Judy—Growing the ‘Program Within a Program’

‘Congratulations on becoming the new Director of Professional Experience!’. The Dean’s words reverberated in my ears as I began to delve into the various aspects of my new role. As I explored what it meant to be DPE, I became increasingly aware just what a complex area of teacher education this is. Number one on the agenda was the ongoing struggle to find placements for all our students in local schools. In addition to this, there was the work around policy and procedures, building relationships with providers, and ensuring that the curriculum around professional experience was clear, enacted and supported. Not to mention a research agenda… Another part of my role was in the development of new locations for international professional experience. I was already involved in the Cook Islands practicum, and was now asked to scope out with colleagues, new placements in Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong. Just what ‘framed’ these placements, though I wasn’t quite sure. We had been running the Cook Islands placement for nearly 20 years, and there was a floundering offering in South Korea. Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong were in their infancy, and the relatively new South African placement was growing well. However, all of these experiences seemed to me to be like satellites—operating well in their own space, with their own leaders, but with very little coordination between them, despite the best efforts of the professional and academic staff involved. Based on my limited but growing experience in this area, I was aware of the huge learning opportunities and challenges for our students, but I was concerned about the ad hoc nature of the organisation of the placements. The huge logistical exercise involved selection and support of students and staff, health and safety concerns, funding and equity issues, calls for new placements to be developed in a range of locations, in a short period of time, research…what to do?

I called a meeting with my Co-director of Professional Experience to discuss the growing number of international professional experience offerings. We invited leaders of the various IPEs, as well as other staff with an interest in this area, to provide some insights into where they thought we might be heading. As I was attempting to develop some strategies and consistent documentation, and to map out possible new locations, I suddenly realised what was happening. We had a ‘program within a program’. This emerging IPE program needed direction, consistency and leadership. As my term as Director of Professional Experience was coming to an end, I was unsure what the next step would be. At the end of that year, I was both pleased and relieved to hear that a dedicated IPE coordinator was to be appointed to oversee this growing and increasingly significant program. It needed to be someone who understood the complexities of the work, who was good at developing relationships at local and global levels, who saw the value of the program and was prepared to put in the ‘hard yards’ to make it all happen. Most importantly, the new coordinator, Ange, would need the backing of the Faculty to make it all happen.

Ange—Forging a New Identity: The International Professional Experience (IPE) Program

And the winner of the Vice-Chancellor’s Award for programs that enhance learning for 2016 is …

It was getting towards the end of 2014, and I had nearly been away from Monash University for two years when I found myself being interviewed over the phone by three senior colleagues for a position back in the Faculty of Education. It was in the area of professional and school experience with a particular focus on international settings. I remember at the time that I really had no idea what a position with a title like that would entail. But I did think, sitting in my pyjamas in the Middle East in the dead quiet of a holy day morning, that it certainly seemed like worlds away from where I currently was.

In starting back in the Faculty in 2015, it soon became apparent that my role, which by this time had evolved into the international professional experience liaison, was twofold: bring processes and procedures to a somewhat disparate set of international offerings and grow these offerings through new partnerships and connections. Our international program was to become a flagship, something that would set the Faculty of Education at Monash apart. Goodness. Where to start? In many ways, because this was a brand new role, I was presented with a blank slate. Exciting and daunting in equal measures. Those early months were a blur of meetings, brainstorming and moving up the learning curve quickly. I was nearly drowning with information connected to the administrative, financial, risk management and logistical aspects of staging professional experience in international locations, both at a Faculty and university level. One early experience does stand out. I drew a panel of people together—students and staff who had participated in previous international experiences—to share with Faculty staff the benefits and challenges of this work as well as start to open up some dialogue about future directions. It was here that a formal program was born. The International Professional Experience (IPE) program emerged from this presentation and the subsequent discussions as our new direction.

A number of milestones emerged along the way for the IPE program. Some of the highlights include the creation of a rigorous selection process, a clear approach to risk management, an increased focus on marketing and communication, securing government-funded scholarships to support student participation and the development of this research project as a way of sharing knowledge about the value of this work. Alongside these developments, partnerships were growing with the number of locations on offer doubling as well as growing student interest in being part of an enriching professional and personal opportunity.

… the International Professional Experience program in the Faculty of Education.

As I hear our program being recognised for its contribution, I am on the cusp of passing the baton onto a new international professional experience liaison in 2017. I motion to the group, well over a dozen of us, to join me on the stage to collect our award. Many things flash through my mind, reliving what we—academic and professional staff alike—have collectively achieved over the past two years. I pause for a moment to gather my thoughts: What might the next exciting chapter in the story of IPE program have in store?

What’s in a Word? Terminology and Key Concepts Explored in the Book

The terminology we use to bring meaning to our experiences matters. The words we use help to position what we say historically as well as in terms of our own personal stance and how we might connect with a construct, conceptually and theoretically. In the context of this book, there are a number of examples, where chapter authors may be referring to similar concepts or constructs, but using different words to capture their understandings and what it means to them. Connection with culture is one such example. Multicultural is a word that has been commonly used in our vernacular for decades to represent the presence and participation of numerous cultural or ethnic groups within a society. It is not a term, however, that is usually used to describe how we might connect with different cultural or ethnic groups and start to become aware of their ways of seeing and being in the world. Intercultural is a term that has emerged to better communicate the connections and relationships that take place between cultures with a greater emphasis on shared understandings. More recently, as a response to globalisation, transcultural has emerged as a way of describing cross-cultural connections and gives a sense of understandings extending through and across all cultures.

While subtleties of meaning and shared understandings are important, we do not intend for this book to be uniform or prescriptive about exactly which terms chapter authors choose to bring meaning to their experiences. Readers will encounter a variety of terms across the chapters, with different authors providing insights into their own decisions on terminology, and their interpretations of concepts. While the authors featured in this book cover a wide range of professional experience locations, participants and experiences, there are some particular key concepts utilised throughout. Many of these are regularly found in the literature about international education, although they may have different meanings for different authors and audiences. Below, we outline some of the key concepts that are brought to the fore in this book, and present a broad understanding of the terms. Later, each of the authors details in their respective chapters their understanding and use of the concept in their particular IPE context.

Professional Learning in Boundary Spaces

In the context of the globalising activities we mentioned at the start of this chapter, there is a range of discourses that researchers have turned to in an effort to describe the challenges and rewards of professionally learning and developing in and across contrasting cultural and educational spaces. Giroux (2005) proposes the term ‘borders’ or ‘border spaces’ to describe the ‘co-mingling’, sometimes ‘clashing’ (p. 2), that can occur when individuals and groups involved in movement across the world encounter each other, bringing to the encounter their own particular experience of different cultures, languages, literacies, histories and educational disciplines. The process of mingling (and making sense of that mingling) and clashing (and seeking to resolve these clashes) is a crucial part of the pre-service teachers’ and mentors’ professional learning and development on their IPE. It is sometimes referred to in the literature, and in the chapters of this book, as a process of negotiation. Giroux calls it ‘border crossing’. Each chapter illustrates and reflects on border crossing (or negotiation of borders), which is a feature of all the IPE programs presented in the book, although some draw on different frameworks to make sense of their experiences, such as the work of Aikenhead (1996).

Following is a short (but by no means exhaustive) list of some of the border spaces or ‘borders’ that are experienced or ‘crossed’ (as Giroux would say) in the IPE projects reported on in this book:

  • Geographic borders—the Australian pre-service teachers and their Australian mentors are literally moving across often vast distances to teach and learn in a new country, with all of its different amenities, laws, institutions, protocols and expectations;

  • Economic borders: sometimes on these IPEs, the Australian pre-service teachers are ‘crossing over’ from privileged school and university experiences, in Australia, to work with schools and students whose level of material wealth is vastly different from what they have been used to;

  • Cultural borders: clearly, the pre-service teachers (and their mentors) encounter different cultures and cultural practices in the host country’s schools and in their day-to-day living experiences in larger school communities or outside the schools altogether. There can also be extreme differences among the different schools in the host country, where the pre-service teachers are placed.

  • Institutional borders: this border space encompasses the differences between what Monash University expects in terms of pre-service teachers practices and responsibilities and the host schools’ expectations. It might also refer to differences among the institutions in the host country which the pre-service teachers and their Australian mentors move between in the course of a single international professional experience

  • Pedagogical borders: pre-service teachers on an IPE invariably work in educational border spaces, where their own emerging ideas about teaching, learning, curriculum and perhaps classroom management must co-mingle and sometimes clash with those of the mentor teacher in the host country whose class they are working in.

  • Internal/personal borders: the borders mentioned above generally represent phenomena outside the individual. Another type of border crossing that many IPE participants experience is internal to themselves, and concerns how they see themselves as professionals and their role in the IPE experience. This involves the evolution or transformation of identities as a teacher/leader/mentor/learner, and learning from navigating or negotiating personal ‘discomfort zones’ created by the challenge of external border crossing experiences.

Identity

Much of the focus of teacher education programs is on helping pre-service students to develop their knowledge and practical skills as classroom practitioners, and the narrative methodologies utilised in this book certainly detail how this happens in a range of IPE contexts. One of the particular benefits of using narrative-based research methodologies is that authors are also able to describe in nuanced ways how the pre-service teachers, academic staff and their mentors developed or changed in terms of their professional identities through participating in an IPE. Although it is difficult to speak for all authors in the book, it is fair to say that the narratives in this volume present broadly post-structural notions of identity, which suggest that one’s professional identity as a pre-service teacher or mentor (or researcher) is dynamic, evolving and multiple. Identity, as discussed in this book, is not something that people on an IPE choose from amongst a range of options on offer, such as on a supermarket shelf. It is an unstable combination of an individual’s developing sense of self, his/her social sense of self and others’ perceptions of these two. As Bauman (2004) puts it, ‘identities float in the air, some of one’s own choice but others inflated and launched by those around’ (p. 11). The extraordinary range of IPE experiences—in culturally and educationally unfamiliar placement classrooms and staffrooms, and beyond these schools in company with others on the IPE—enrich and promote the development of academic, pre-service teacher and mentor identities described in the pages that follow.

Discomfort and Support

The literature on international teaching experiences, and our collective experiences as described in this book, suggests that IPE provides an overwhelmingly positive learning experience for participants. This is the central reason why such programs exist and are expanding. However, not all learning is achieved through personally enjoyable or comfortable experiences. ‘Pedagogy of discomfort’ is a purposeful teaching strategy, originally described by Boler (1999), which is underpinned by the belief that students (in any teaching and learning context) can learn in profound ways when they are outside their ‘comfort zones’. It appreciates that the student may experience some degree of discomfort, but that this is necessary in order to prompt the student to question and reflect upon some fundamental beliefs, assumptions or practices. The intention is for the discomfort to be substantial enough for the student to be ‘jolted’ into reflecting differently about some of those beliefs, assumptions or practices, but it should not be so traumatic that it becomes distracting from, or even unhelpful in, the kinds of reflection and learning that are hoped for. Zembylas (2015) has argued that there might be overriding ethical reasons for a learner to be expected to endure severe discomfort when the outcome of that pain is profound learning. Almost all research literature that investigates the stories of people undertaking an IPE makes explicit reference to their experience of being ‘out of their comfort zone’, at least in the early periods of their practicum. One might argue that all international professional experiences involve some elements of pedagogy of discomfort. However, there are significant differences in the various pre-service teachers’ responses to this discomfort, and ways the IPE university-based and school-based mentors are able to scaffold the students through this discomfort. As with all pedagogical strategies, there are risks associated with this, which should never be ignored by educators or researchers.

The Development of This Collection

Along with the significant growth of the Monash University Faculty of Education IPE program in recent years has been the growing recognition that this program was unique for teacher education in Australia in terms of its scope and processes, compared to IPEs provided by other universities. The distinctiveness of the Monash program also lies within the growing body of research that documents the stories and experiences of participants, and that highlights the educational values of these programs from a number of different perspectives. Key staff in the Faculty believed that it was time to focus on the research that had already been undertaken in relation to the IPE program, and to foster and support continued research, through the development of this collection.

To share the learning inherent in these experiences, we three editors met to discuss the focus and purpose of this book in terms of how it would be distinctive with respect to existing publications, what the methodology of the research might be and the style of writing. Articulating our focus leads to the submission of a book proposal to Springer for an edited collection that would feature a narrative approach to documenting and critically investigating the professional learning gained from participation in a range of IPE programs, from a number of perspectives. With this in mind, invitations were extended to all who had taken a leading role in a Monash IPE in the last decade to submit an expression of interest, including a proposed abstract, for a chapter in the collection. All who had submitted expressions of interest participated in a half-day project workshop, where writing ideas and methodologies for the book were discussed. This helped to develop a shared understanding amongst all authors of the book’s focus and methodology, particularly in relation to how a narrative approach was understood and enacted. Following this workshop, authors received feedback from editors on their abstracts and then embarked on the process of developing their chapters. Approximately six months later, the authors and editors participated in a two-day writing retreat where early drafts were shared, and all chapters received feedback from other authors in the book. Again, this collective process assisted in developing a shared vision and understanding of book, including identifying key themes emerging from the IPE and common frameworks that assist with making sense of this experience. Finally, revised drafts were reviewed by us as editors, and detailed feedback was given before completed manuscripts were submitted to the publisher. In the following chapters, you will read the outcome of this collaboration. Before that, however, we present an overview of the chapters and the key themes of each narrative.

Overview of Chapters

In this chapter, the editors of the collection have outlined the background and context of the Monash University Faculty of Education IPE program, discussed some of the key methodological and conceptual ideas underpinning the collection, and presented our own narratives about the evolution of the IPE program over the past decade or so. The first of the narratives of learning from IPE is presented in Chap. 2, where Ange Fitzgerald takes us on her journey as leader of and within the IPE program, and presents her professional learning as the evolution of multiple identities: tourist/learner; tour guide/teacher; traveller/individual and travel agent/leader. In Chap. 3, Gillian Kidman, Catherine Lang and Marcelle Cacciattolo continue the exploration of the impact of IPE on the professional learning and identity of academic leaders of these programs, when they discuss their experiences in Malaysia. They present one outcome of their leadership and collaboration, the model of Academic Intercultural Competencies (AIC). Chapter 4 takes us to South Africa, where co-authors Graham Parr and Julie Faulkner (from Monash University) and Craig Rowe (community liaison with Monash South Africa) use narrative to investigate ethical tensions in leading the South African practicum over several years. They propose a dialogic conceptual framework—‘transcultural dialogue across difference’—to explain how they and their students have negotiated a way through these tensions. The notion of community is also included in Chap. 5, where Robyn Babaeff explores pre-service teachers’ and academics’ experiences of learning with, and within, school and local communities during the Cook Islands IPE.

A different perspective is offered in Chap. 6, when Janina Kahn-Horwitz, David Mittelberg, Roberta Bell-Kligler and Rachael Gelfman Schultz discuss their experiences as teacher educators in Israel hosting inbound Australian pre-service teachers. In this chapter, the authors examine how various stakeholders in this practicum dealt with the cultural and linguistic challenges of pre-service teachers teaching in schools, where English is not the language of instruction. Similar challenges are explored by Libby Tudball and Mike Phillips in Chap. 7. Here, they discuss the experiences of pre-service teachers undertaking IPE in Prato, Italy, and in particular, how pre-service teachers gained a greater understanding of themselves and others in multicultural and multilingual Italian classrooms. We return to South Africa in Chap. 8, where Pearl Subban and Allie Clemans (teacher educators from Monash University who were actually born in South Africa) explore the experiences of a group of 13 female Australian pre-service teachers and their academic leaders on IPE in Johannesburg. Through a series of narrative reflective cases, they show how the Australian pre-service teachers and teacher educators journeyed outside the familiarity of their ‘home’ country, and how they responded to the sameness of, and differences between, between the two countries. The use of ICTs in teaching during IPE is discussed by Mike Phillips in Chap. 9, where he turns the focus inward to explore how the impact of the context of IPE in Italy challenged his existing beliefs about the role of ICTs in student learning. Through these experiences, his understanding of his identity and practices as a teacher educator shifted from a focus on knowledge, particularly the interplay of technological knowledge with pedagogical and content knowledge, to deeper considerations of how the local context mediates these understandings.

Chapter 10 brings us back to Malaysia, where Gillian Kidman and two pre-service teachers, Cassy Eaton and Zoe Davies, explore situations that took them well outside their comfort zones, and how these discomforting experiences actually contributed to their growing intercultural competencies and sense of self as global educators. Still in Malaysia, in Chap. 11, Julie Faulkner and Anne Keary also explore pedagogies of discomfort when discussing the vexed issue of potential global threat impacting on IPEs, in this case, the fear of a perceived imminent terrorist attack. They show how and why reliance is an essential quality for those participating in IPE, anywhere in the world. The final narrative is presented in Chap. 12, where Judy Williams provides an exploration of the evolution of her professional identity as a teacher educator over the course of four year’s involvement in IPE in the Cook Islands. She concludes that managing and negotiating relationships is at the core of the work of IPE, and that in this process, it is possible to begin to discover your academic self.

Whether you read this book from cover to cover, or dip into various chapters as interest and time permits, we hope that you gain a deeper understanding and appreciation of the value, complexity and learning opportunities that are inherent in international professional experiences. We also hope that educators around the world can benefit from the insights shared by the authors in this book.