Preservice teachers' experiences with internship-related challenges in regional schools and their career intention: implications for teacher education programs

This article reports a qualitative case study that explored challenges that Vietnamese early childhood preservice teachers faced when undertaking the teaching internship in regional schools and how these challenges influenced their career intention. Qualitative content analyses of 20 semistructured interviews revealed that despite several challenges at first, they gradually had positive experiences with using pedagogical knowledge and skills, working with stakeholders and coping with contextual issues. It was suggested that these challenges were tied to a disconnect between the teacher education program and early childhood schools, Confucian educational values and practices, and mismatches between preservice teachers' expectation and reality of the profession. Internship-related challenges appeared not to strongly affect interns' intentions of becoming teachers. Instead, the self-efficacy gained from overcoming internship-related challenges, mismatches between preservice teachers' expectation of and the reality of the profession, their passion for teaching, love for children, and family choice seemed to influence their career intention. The article discusses important implications for improving the quality of teacher education programs and the effectiveness of teaching internships.