Internationalisation of the curriculum and digitalisation in initial Spanish language teacher education in Germany

Abstract

The internationalization of the curriculum (IoC), which is understood as the incorporation of an international and intercultural dimension into the content of the curriculum as well as the teaching and learning arrangements and support services of a program of study (Leask, 2015), has become an essential component of every modern language teacher education program in order to meet the demands of the 21st century school and educate for global citizenship by becoming familiar with other teaching contexts and didactic approaches. The present study analyses the results of an IoC project in two student cohorts, future teachers of Spanish as a Foreign Language (SFL) in Germany: one that attended face-to-face lectures with international experts, and a virtual one, students who worked with digital materials developed from those lectures. The analysis of the interviews and reflection papers (N=16) shows that students have become aware of the international dimension of language teaching, have overcome the traditional national-local conception of didactics, are questioning their prejudices about language teaching and have experienced a broadening of perspectives along with a professional development. These results were achieved equally in both the face-to-face and virtual cohorts underscoring the potential digitization which is present in the internationalization of language teacher education.