21st Biennial Conference of the International Study Association on Teachers & Teaching

How equity and diversity is addressed in teacher education: Findings from four countries

Paulien Meijer¹, Frances Rust⁶, Maria Flores², Alina Boutiuc-Kaiser³, Andreas Köpfer³, Lieke Jager¹, Eddie Denessen¹, Eline Vanassche⁴, Ruben Vanderlinde⁵, Panayota Cotzaridis⁴, Benjamin Ponet⁵

¹Radboud University, The Netherlands; ²Braga University, Portugal; ³PH Freiburg, Germany; ⁴KU Leuven KULAK, Belgium; ⁵Ghent University, Belgium; ⁶University of Pennsylvania, USA

At the core of establishing a European Education Area by 2025, lies the need to improve social cohesion and “experience European identity in all its diversity” (European Commission, 2017). To this end, “giving more support to teachers” became a central objective of the European Education Area, including that “Member States take action to support the teacher education profession” (European Commission, 2013) in recognition of their central role in every stage of the teacher’s career. European policy documents reflect growing awareness of teachers’ and teacher education’s crucial role in developing more equitable education systems. In this context, we work on a large-scale EU-funded project, mapping policies and practices regarding equity and diversity in teacher education programmes in eight European countries, with the aim of addressing the professional development needs of teacher educators across across EU countries to enable teachers to attain the necessary knowledge, skills and attitudes essential to addressing the equity and diversity issues they face. This session reports on policies and practices in four of these countries: Portugal, Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium.

The three contributions are connected by a cohesive methodological framework, including document analysis on national and institutional levels, and focusgroup interviews with programme leaders in teacher education, teacher educators, and student teachers. This lead to a multilevel and crossnational understanding across two key areas: (1) initial teacher education for teaching pre-service teachers to teach for equity and diversity; and (2) practices for upskilling teacher educators’ equity and diversity competencies.

We target three objectives:

deliver a rich account of provision for pre-service teachers and teacher educators in the participating countries, focussing on the national and institutional levels;
identify strengths and gaps in existing provision on the different levels in each country;
define key priorities for the professional development of teacher educators on the European level.

Conference Agenda