In recent years there is an ongoing call to engage more minority teachers in Germany’s educational system. The hope that is associated with this call is that minority teachers can deal with diversity issues more adequately and professionally. Minority pupils, but also majority pupils are believed to benefit from the employment of minority teachers. Up to now, no or little evidence has been established that supports this hope and existing research mainly examines the teachers’ perspective. In order to explore the conditions for successfully realizing the supposed relevance of minority teachers, the paper focuses on the pupils’ perspective. It is assumed that a positive effect of minority teachers occurs not by their mere presence but in interaction with their pupils and specific constraints and affordances of their classrooms. Based on participant observations and group discussions an ongoing project tries 1) to reconstruct pupils’ experiential knowledge on school and teaching and 2) to explore what relevance and meaning is attributed to experiences with minority teachers. Results so far indicate that teachers’ minority status becomes relevant only in certain situations and that this difference dimension seems to be tightly interwoven with other dimensions (e.g. age, sex) that are more salient for pupils.