Internationalisation of the higher education system continues to have a strong impact on national education policies. From an international perspective, learning to teach in globally competent and culturally responsive ways is a core element of teacher education. For this purpose, academically and practice-oriented student teacher exchange programmes have been established. It is often taken for granted that corresponding internships abroad offer positive learning experiences, but research shows that these expectations are frequently not met. This paper, hermeneutics therefore, investigates if and how learning takes place in multi-week international internships, what shapes, enables, limits or obstructs this learning. The investigation is based on a qualitative-hermeneutic approach with data collected from group discussions and analysed according to the documentary method. The analyses led to two 'ideal types': the first is based on learning from contrasts and includes sub-types in which the student teachers' perceptions and interpretations are differentiated or distanced to a greater or lesser extent. The second ideal type, in which learning takes place through challenges, is also divided into sub-types which differ in the degree of self-efficacy experienced by the students. The paper concludes with some suggestions on how pre-service teachers can be supported so that the learning potential of their internships can be exploited more fully.