Internationalisation is now integrated into the policies and curricula of most universities in the world, and increasingly embedded within education courses. It is valued for contributing to the quality of education and for broadening students’ experiences during their studies (Beelen & Jones, 2015). But, initial teacher education programs are still nationally-oriented, and internationalisation questions are often marginalised (Alexiadou et.al., 2021; Bamberger & Yemini, 2022). Our presentation reports findings from a research that investigates internationalisation of initial teacher education in a Swedish university. We focus on dimensions of internationalisation from the perspectives of the curriculum for K4-6 and students. Our research questions are: (a) How does the teacher education curriculum engage with internationalisation? (b) What are the perceptions and experiences of teacher education students in relation to internationalisation? Our empirical research consists of (a) content document analysis of the Primary Teacher Education programme curriculum; (b) review of core documents that frame teacher education in the specific university, and, (c) interviews with ten teacher education students. Our analysis suggests that despite the aspirations in the university-level policies, internationalisation does not emerge as an apparent agenda at the syllabi level. Explicit references of internationalisation are quite scarce. There are however (a) student skills and attributes connected to internationalisation such as critical thinking and global citizenship, and (b) whole syllabi that deal with interculturality and inclusion (themes of social justice, democracy, diversity, multilingualism, human local and global ecosystems). Nevertheless, the syllabi appear to be mostly situated in local and national than global narratives, which reflects the dilemma of universities, and Teacher Education, in their internationalisation process: balancing between national/local needs and those from internationalisation agendas. The students’ interviews suggest very positive attitudes towards further internationalisation of the curriculum. Students critique the relatively low engagement with internationalization questions, and propose that this could be better integrated into the pedagogical practice.

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