Global lessons for local educators: how international online exchanges can shape preservice teachers’ professional sense-making

In an era of rising ethno-nationalism, teachers bear a critical responsibility to address global issues in classrooms. This study, situated at the intersection of teacher education and global citizenship education, examines how international online exchanges among preservice teachers can shape professional sense-making. Preservice teachers from five countries prepared lesson plans on contested global issues and engaged in cross-national dialogue. Drawing on lesson plans and post-exchange reflections, qualitative analysis identified three recurring dimensions in participants’ interpretations of the exchange: political, pedagogical, and professional. While prior research focuses on tensions between how teachers teach and who teachers understand themselves to be, this study foregrounds global citizenship education’s contribution to professional identity formation, examines how engagement with global ‘otherness’ shapes local professionalism, and proposes a conceptual tool for teacher educators. By situating professional identity within dialogic encounters, we offer an empirically grounded account of how global citizenship education contributes to preservice teacher education.