Chapter 2: International Immersion Experiences: Helping Preservice Teachers to Reconceptualize the Role of Poor Communities in Education

Teacher education programs with a social justice mission have the enduring responsibility of challenging preservice teachers’ perceptions of poor communities as passive and disengaged from education. This chapter suggests that infusing these programs with an international perspective offers a powerful tool to address this challenge. Through the testimonies of a group of preservice teachers who took an education class with an immersion trip to Bolivia, this chapter narrates how this course altered students’ perceptions of these communities. Based on these testimonies, this chapter advocates for informing teacher education programs’ curriculums with an international perspective and concludes with some suggestions on how to accomplish this task.