Urban Spaces for Intercultural Encounters: Teacher Students’ Reflections on the Cultural Plunge

The article reports on the experience of utilising urban spaces for intercultural encounters as part of a teacher education course on intercultural education in a Finnish University. The ‘cultural plunges’ – brief exposures to difference – reported in twenty two teacher students’ reflective learning journals are analysed to understand how students’ used experiential intercultural encounters for learning and for critical reflection. Suggestions are made both on the potential value and on the practical implementation of cultural plunges as part of the curriculum for intercultural education in teacher education.