Internationalization of teacher education in Norway: a means of quality enhancement?

This paper presents ideas and reflections about my ongoing PhD-project on internationalization of teacher education in Norway, more specifically international student mobility (ISM) as a measure for quality enhancement. Raising the number of students participating in international mobility during their studies is an important policy concern in Norway. However, recent statistics indicate that especially teacher education programs display comparatively low mobility rates. Through document analysis and interviews the PhD-project sets out to explore how Norwegian teacher education programs deal with the expectations from above, and how they implement strategies for internationalization and ISM specifically. More importantly, the project seeks to throw light on the taken-for-granted relationship between internationalization, ISM and quality enhancement at program level. Eventually, this can provide important information about the benefits and challenges with ISM in teacher education on a micro-level, and thus contribute to the discussion about how institutions bring responsible internationalization into practice.