Conference Agenda

Higher education institutions increasingly aim to strengthen social cohesion and democratic resilience, and teacher education is expected to prepare professionals capable of navigating cultural plurality, global interconnectedness, and societal complexity. Institutional engagement strategies - including international mobility, inter-institutional cooperation, and structured intercultural learning - are promoted as mechanisms for fostering such competences. In this context, intercultural competence can be understood as a form of professional cultural capital that enhances teachers’ capacity for inclusive and trust-building practice.

But despite these ambitions, it remains unclear whether institutional engagement and partnership structures within Lithuanian teacher education systematically translate into measurable intercultural competence. Internationalisation initiatives often function as symbolic commitments rather than structurally embedded practices, and access to engagement opportunities may be unevenly distributed across institutions and study pathways. As a result, teacher education may unintentionally reproduce disparities in access to intercultural capital rather than mitigate them.

Therefore, this study examines how configurations of institutional engagement and partnership structures shape the development and distribution of intercultural competence in Lithuanian teacher education. Drawing on a national quantitative survey conducted in 2026 within the INTERACT project (Internationalisation of Teacher Education: Intra-state and Inter-state Cooperation, No. P-EDU-23-27), the research analyses pedagogy students and recent graduates (since 2019) across higher education institutions.

Intercultural sensitivity is measured using the validated short form of the Intercultural Sensitivity Scale (ISS-15) (Chen & Starosta, 2000; Wang & Zhou, 2015). The theoretical framework draws on Bourdieu’s concept of embodied and institutionalised cultural capital (1986) and on educational reproduction theory (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977), conceptualising intercultural competence as a socially structured resource shaped by institutional conditions. Gouldner’s (1957) distinction between “cosmopolitan” and “local” orientations further informs the analysis of how international exposure influences emerging professional identities.

The study pursues five objectives:

• to map the distribution of intercultural sensitivity among teacher education students and graduates;
• to identify engagement-related determinants of competence development;
• to analyse institutional and programme-level variations;
• to assess inequalities in access to intercultural capital;
• to derive implications for strengthening partnerships as mechanisms of professional capital formation.

By empirically linking engagement structures to competence outcomes, the study demonstrates that institutional partnerships are not merely governance arrangements but constitutive drivers of professional development. Strengthening intra-state and inter-state cooperation in teacher education thus emerges as a concrete pathway for fostering deeper engagement between higher education and society and reinforcing trust through the preparation of interculturally competent educators.

Quality assurance policies in Initial Teacher Education have become central to contemporary higher education systems, shaping evaluation regimes that fundamentally redefine how educational value, quality, and institutional performance are understood. While evaluation and standardisation devices are intended to strengthen public trust, research indicates that they may also reinforce managerial and performative logics that place pressure on academic autonomy and formative purposes (Ball, 2003, 2012; Caspersen et al., 2017; Labraña et al., 2024). In Chile, the implementation of the Teacher Professional Standards and the National Diagnostic Assessment (NDA) exemplifies these tensions, as improvement discourses are closely intertwined with accountability requirements linked to accreditation processes (Donoso & Ruffinelli, 2020).

Although the NDA is formally defined as a formative assessment aimed at supporting institutional improvement, empirical evidence suggests that its institutional enactment is heavily conditioned by organisational factors, technical capacities, and data-use practices. These factors can limit its transformative potential and its contribution to a sustainable quality culture (Giaconi et al., 2020; Maturana et al., 2025). Crucially, the way in which evaluation regimes are constructed often determines which actors are included or marginalised in the meaning-making processes surrounding assessment. Consequently, it is necessary to examine how evaluation regimes are interpreted and utilised by teacher education institutions, and the implications this has for institutional legitimacy and social trust in higher education.

This study analyses how a national evaluation regime—manifested through pedagogical standards and NDA results—is enacted within a university-based Initial Teacher Education programme, and how this process affects the promotion of a quality culture and the social legitimation of teacher education. Grounded in institutional research and scholarship on evidence-informed decision-making in higher education (Mandinach & Schildkamp, 2021), the study adopts a mixed-methods institutional case study design. Data sources include: (a) institutional documents on quality assurance; (b) semi-structured interviews with programme directors and academic staff; (c) aggregated NDA results from 2023–2025; and (d) a student questionnaire capturing perceptions of the assessment and institutional support mechanisms. Qualitative data were analysed through content analysis, while quantitative data were examined descriptively to identify performance trends over time. Integrating these sources enables an examination of evaluation outcomes alongside the uses, meanings, and expectations that different actors attribute to the evaluation regime, which is central to understanding its institutional impact.

Findings indicate significant organisational transformations following the creation of an Educational Evaluation Unit designed to coordinate the use of standards and evaluation results. These changes include curricular adjustments, preventive monitoring strategies, and the standardisation of academic planning instruments. NDA results show progressive improvement in pedagogical domains—particularly student learning and professional responsibilities—while disciplinary performance remains relatively stable. Institutionally, the NDA operates as a high-visibility evaluation device, primarily responding to external accountability demands and shaping a conception of quality closely linked to compliance and comparability. In this context, academic staff experience persistent tensions between professional autonomy and institutional pressures to align teaching practices with standardised performance metrics, reflecting broader constraints on how academic work is valued within evaluation-driven environments.

Furthermore, the study identifies a predominantly informational use of NDA results, rather than their systematic integration into pedagogical reflection and curricular improvement processes. Student perceptions reinforce this pattern, indicating limited opportunities for active participation in the evaluation process and a prevailing perception of the regime as externally imposed. These findings are consistent with previous studies highlighting fragmented uses of evaluation results and limited assessment of the impact of improvement actions (Giaconi et al., 2021; Maturana et al., 2023).

In conclusion, the key challenge lies not merely in improving performance indicators, but in reconsidering the purposes of the evaluation regime and its effective contribution to building trust in teacher education. Reframing the NDA as a driver of institutional learning requires strengthening organisational capacities that enable a balance between accountability, academic autonomy, and educational value, ensuring that evaluation supports sustained trust among students, academics, and society rather than functioning primarily as a mechanism of control and formal legitimation.

Student surveys are common in external quality assurance, often at the level of study programs taken as a whole. Critics question the validity of using student surveys to measure quality, question how surveys cast students as consumers of a service as opposed to active participants in academia and suggest that other forms of student involvement might be more fruitful (see e.g. Stensaker and Matear 2025; Langen and Harris 2023). On the upside, student surveys can provide representative descriptions of student evaluation, while simultaneously allowing to elaborate their views through open-ended questions.

However, representativity is not straightforward. Sometimes, students strongly diverge in their evaluations of quality, within and across study-programs. Differences in quality is one obvious explanation for such differences. Yet, empirical research showcase that a single student may hold various quality-notions at the same time and that quality notions can vary systematically across countries and demographics (Jungblut, Vukasovic and Stensaker 2015). For this reason, it is not obvious for all use-cases, that each respondent in a student survey should be given equal weight. This is especially true for comparisons, where there is a risk of comparing students channelling different quality-notions. Here, we explore such heterogeneity through the case of primary teacher education in Norway, discussing the consequences for various QA use-cases, asking;

What explains Norwegian primary school teacher students’reported satisfaction with the quality of their education in student surveys?

On average, primary school teacher students in Norway consistently report lower overall satisfaction with the quality of their study programs than students attending other study programs in Studiebarometeret, the Norwegian national student survey. Even though a majority of primary teacher students are satisfied or very satisfied with the quality of their study programs in Studiebarometeret, these results could be taken to indicate that primary teacher education has a quality-problem in Norway. Alternatively, teacher students might systematically draw on other quality-notions than the average student.

A comprehensive evaluation of the quality of primary school teacher education programs in Norway conducted by NOKUT from 2022-2024 do not lend support to the conclusion that primary teacher education programs are of particularly low quality in a Norwegian context. The evaluation was ESG-compliant and drew on many data sources, including a student survey (n = 3390) designed to fit the particularities of primary teacher education as part of the evaluation. This survey, which included a lot of open-ended questions, allows us to dig deeper into potential reasons for the responses provided by primary teacher students than Studiebarometeret.

Methodologically, we take an exploratory approach. Our survey designs do not allow us to make strong assumptions about the direction of causality between different survey-items, but due to our theoretical interest in students evaluations of quality, we treat survey-items asking for evaluations of quality as “dependent variables”. Our data sources are primary teacher students' responses to Studiebarometeret and the student survey in the recent NOKUT evaluation.

We set out by describing the overall variation in primary teacher students’ responses to closed survey-items asking for quality-evaluation within sub-themes of the evaluation-survey and quality dimensions underpinning Studiebarometeret. Thereafter, we assess the extent to which primary teacher students are consistently positive or negative in their evaluation of quality within each sub-theme at the individual level. Following this step, we construct groups of students within each sub-theme, distinguishing between students providing mostly positive evaluations, students providing primarily negative evaluations of quality and others. In our interpretations, we place particular emphasis on positive student evaluations. Finally, we turn to the main research question, assessing the extent to which demographic variables, grades and students’ answers to factual questions about education provided and own behaviour correlate with belonging to the groups created in the previous step. We also draw on open-ended survey questions.

For the evaluation-survey, our preliminary results suggest that grades and demographics matter little for perceived quality. Specific characteristics of received education, such as having a practice teacher that also teach at the students’ study program correlate more strongly with student evaluations of quality.