Developing Cosmopolitan Professional Identities: Engaging Australian and Hong Kong Trainee Teachers in Intercultural Conversations

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School classrooms have become increasingly culturally and linguistically diverse, making it imperative for teachers to develop more cosmopolitan professional identities, demonstrating globalised perspectives and being able to communicate and relate interculturally. Intercultural education should therefore be an essential component of teacher education programs, assisting trainee teachers to become accomplished intercultural communicators, able to build relationships and mediate difference (Byram & Fleming 1998; Byram 2009). Unfortunately, however, intercultural education tends to lack a discipline-based core within the structures of teacher education, and hence, teachers often lack the necessary conceptual grounding and skills in intercultural communication (Cushner & Mahon 2009). This was the impetus for bringing together a group of domestic and international trainee teachers to engage in structured intercultural conversations as part of their teacher education studies at an Australian university. The Australian trainee teachers were in the second year of their bachelor of education degree program at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane, Australia. Their conversational partners were postgraduate teacher trainees from Hong Kong who were participating in a short study abroad professional program at the same university. This research was framed as a case study exploring the affordances of this curriculum intervention. The research question guiding this case study was: “Does engaging international and domestic trainee teachers in structured intercultural conversations help them develop more cosmopolitan professional identities?”