Internationalization of Teacher Education During COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought obvious challenges to student and staff mobility, thus impeding internationalization abroad. The goal of the project described in this paper is to identify and implement effective teaching methods to increase internationalization at home (IaH). The context of this research is Norwegian teacher education (TED). TED students in their second-year pedagogy course at a Norwegian university participated in the project in the Fall semester 2020 and the Spring semester 2021. An action research approach was adopted as the main research approach. The action steps taken in the Fall semester 2020 (first cycle) were analyzed and revised before the implementation of adjusted action steps in the Spring semester 2021 (second cycle). The overall conclusion is that there is much potential in the digital technology for providing the opportunities for IaH. However, multiple aspects must be carefully planned for the IaH activities to be successful, such as close integration of the IaH assignments with the pedagogy course at home university, providing students with an easy access to the IaH assignments online, and taking consideration to the different academic calendars of international partner universities. The lessons learned from both cycles contribute to the revision of the action steps to be implemented in the Fall semester 2021 with the goal of increasing IaH.