Editorial: Intercultural education for student mobility

HE institutions are increasingly aware of the need to prepare and support their students from an intercultural point of view during mobility, and offer courses and modules designed with a variety of approaches and theoretical constructs. The purpose of these is to provide students with opportunities for reflection and analysis, as well as with the concepts of identity, socialization and culture, so as to enable them to learn from their exposure to various kinds of social differences and commonalities experienced abroad. Nevertheless, these initiatives are still relatively rare and, with very few exceptions (Jackson 2008; Paige et al. 2006), have seldom been researched in terms of their intended and obtained outcomes, methods and practices. This special issue of Intercultural Education intends to foster discussion on educational initiatives which aim to lay the ground for and support intercultural learning in study abroad. It engages not only with the theory, but also with the practice of teaching the intercultural in the context of student mobility.