Reflections on a (First) Year with
Why go abroad as a teacher training student, for a whole year (let alone two)?
Part of the choice was only too simple: I had always regretted not having gone abroad during my first studies. Having started studying again, in order to add a job education and qualification for working as a teacher to my skills, I jumped at the chance to do so now.
It's not only that, though...
Teachers are hardly the best-regarded of professionals. Sure, education is necessary, but who really likes school? Does school have to be liked? Is such dislike of school and learning a problem caused by teachers themselves, and that it has to be work, not (only) pleasure just teachers' cheap excuse for not working differently? Don't you become a teacher only because of the easy hours and months of free time?
Maybe for some it's a matter of never wanting to leave school and how it structures life. For me, it's a matter of loving knowledge and wanting to promote it. It's a major issue for matters of sustainability, the field I focus on.
Being, by and large, forced to switch careers - or rather, to combine interests into career parts that fit together -
Campus Europae, in Latvia
teacher training is an excellent job training to add to my academic training. Always having worked towards an ability to live the way I want to, always a bit removed from the "normal" way, of course it fits to participate in such a program as Campus Europae.
For "normal" teacher training students, if you don't want to be just another one of those people doing just what is necessary to get to the next holiday time, but to further your horizon and gain experience with the way school (and teacher education) works in different countries, it's probably the best opportunity currently available.
With the Bologna process, European higher education is becoming more integrated (or at least meant to be); schools are being compared, but primary and secondary education is still very different across Europe. How, however, would you know if you only studied "your subject" and never looked left or right?
On the other hand, how much better - or at least more interesting - a (potential) teacher will you be, having experienced how teachers are trained and work in two more countries than your own?