Internationalisation has become an important part of the strategic development of Universities of Teacher Education in Switzerland, and mobility programmes belong to the most prevalent activities in this regard. Often, it is claimed that mobility programmes contributed to the future teachers’ «global competencies». Often, the learning is assumed to take place almost automatically while studies show that this learning cannot be taken for granted. Sometimes, these learning expectations are not met (Leutwyler, 2014), in fact, sometimes, the international experience is even counterproductive leading to increased culturalising or stereotyping of the constructed ‘others’ (Dockrill et al., 2016). This paper, therefore, aims at tackling the question of how learning from mobility experiences is shaped and in what ways it is supported, enabled or obstructed. For this purpose, insights from two different research projects are consulted and discussed: The first project addresses learning from international internships (Mantel et al., 2022). We pursued a qualitative-hermeneutic approach according to the Documentary Method (Bohnsack, 2010) and collected data from group discussions with student teachers returning from an international internship. The analysis shows that there are two main aspects that can explain to what extent positive learning outcomes can be achieved or not. One of them refers to the way of dealing with perceived contrasts from the familiar and the other to the way of dealing with particularly challenging situations. The results are discussed with reference to the concept of reflective thinking (Dewey, 1910) as well as to the concept of self-efficacy (Bandura, 1997). The second project deals with the question of what learning abroad experiences mean from a biographical perspective as well as related to the pedagogical orientations, particularly in terms of orientations in dealing with questions of belonging and equity in schools of a migration society. Again, the research was pursued according to the Documentary Method (Bohnsack, 2010), this time with data collection through biographical-narrative interviews (Schütze, 1983). These analyses reveal that the question of whether learning from international experience has an effect on the way of teaching can best be explained if referring to the teachers’ own feeling of recognition (Honneth, 1995; Butler, 1997). The insights from both studies have relevant implications for the questions of how mobility programmes can be designed. At the University of Teacher Education Zug, a new module has been created on the basis of the mentioned insights. The experiences will be shared and discussed.

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