This action research is part of the initial training of primary school teachers at the Haute école pédagogique du canton de Vaud in Switzerland, and more specifically within the framework of an intercultural exchange module (PEERS) between Switzerland and Italy (University of Bologna). Through the understanding of comparative education systems and the discovery of otherness, these PEERS projects, which involve a dozen Swiss and Italian students each year, aim to develop the mobility capital of future teachers in training in order to make it operational in the classroom. The main educational theme is the issue of including student diversity.
Students involved in these projects are encouraged to take a meta-perspective on their somatic experience of moving through space by keeping a travel journal, a kind of reflective space. They start from their experience of otherness and transpose it into their professional actions and identity construction as future teachers. This experience of spatial mobility, recounted through biographical writing, is then reworked in the form of a final report upon their return from their trip. This allows them to reflect on the transformations that have taken place in their professional stance. It is therefore a somato-reflexive approach (Eddy, 2016) since corporeality is strongly involved in this tertiary education program as well as the reflexivity that reflects this, through the students' logbooks.