This paper aims to present a completed study which was conducted in Vienna with pre-service teachers. The aim of the study was to hear pre-service teachers’ perceptions regarding their own needs, strengths to teach in culturally diverse classrooms as well as their predictions for their future experiences in culturally diverse classrooms and their suggestions to teacher education agenda.

How to achieve democratic multicultural society through education has been under discussion in Europe for a long time (Portera, 2008). As a country which is resided by various cultural groups, Austria is also trying to handle intercultural and multicultural education as a process with the help of policies and principles. Being among the top five multicultural cities across Europe, Vienna serves as a good example where pre-service teachers are likely to teach in a class populated with various cultures. However, no multicultural education can be achieved with only policies or without teacher development (Savage, 2011). As ministry, schools and teacher education institutions are interdependent; teacher education institutions are the bridges that carry the vision of the ministry to schools and it is significant to construct teacher education programs that support pre-service teachers with cultural awareness (Harraveld 2007; Valentin 2006).

The relevant research to locate how the principles of multicultural and intercultural education reflect on Austrian teacher education agenda is limited to a few studies with teachers (Luciak & Khan-Svik, 2008). Among these studies, a decade ago, Furch (2005) indicated that teachers understand the intercultural education principle partially and his results were strengthened with a relatively small-scaled study conducted with teachers by Strohmeier and Fricker (2007) who found that the understanding of intercultural principle is subject to teachers’ personal attitudes.

With this study, our aim was to go a step beyond and give pre-service teachers a chance to voice their own beliefs regarding their preparation for multicultural education. Such a research conducted in a multicultural capital can be a help to identify pre-service teachers’ understandings of multicultural education and to locate the positionality of teacher education institutions in building the required teaching force.

As Valentin (2006), Walker and Stone (2011) suggest, to see how teacher education programs prepare effective teachers for culturally diverse classrooms, we must deal with how teachers perceive their own preparedness. Examining the perceptions of pre-service teachers concerning their beliefs of multicultural education may add new insight into the existing subject matter (Smith, 2009). In addition, asking them about self-reflection helps deepen their understanding about how cultural knowledge is important (He & Cooper, 2009; Sharma, Phillon & Malewski, 2011; Turner, 2012) and identify their own attitude as well as their own readiness, biases, positive or negative attitudes (Gay, 2010; Gay & Kirkland, 2003; Moule, 2004).

In our study, pre-service teachers in four different teacher education institutions in Vienna were asked to voice their perceptions related to their strengths and needs for teaching in culturally diverse classrooms as well as their predictions on their future experiences in culturally diverse classrooms and about their suggestions regarding the agenda of teacher education programs by making use of research questions below;

• How do pre-service teachers perceive their strengths with regard to teaching in culturally diverse classrooms?

• How do pre-service teachers perceive their needs with regard to teaching in culturally diverse classrooms?

• How do pre-service teachers foresee their future teaching experiences in culturally diverse classrooms?

• What are the pre-service teachers’ suggestions to teacher education programs with regard to curriculum for building teacher-preparedness in culturally diverse classrooms?

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