Calls for reform in teacher education are increasingly made in response to dissatisfaction with student performance and poor outcomes, particularly for marginalised groups such as those living in poverty, or those who may have additional needs associated with disability or language (EADSNE, 2001). Traditional responses have included adding a new course or additional content to an existing course.  Such courses and content tend to focus on targeted interventions for marginalised or excluded student groups rather than reconsidering and restructuring how all teachers are prepared to work in today’s schools. Because they are presented as distinct content, issues of diversity have become marginalized within teacher education programmes (Cochran-Smith & Dudley-Marling, 2012) and teacher education programmes have been accused of myopic vision in failing “to imagine possibilities beyond the parameters of inherited institutional practice” (Ware, 2005, p. 105). Today important debates about how to best prepare teachers to work with diverse groups of students are raising awareness of role that teacher education plays in achieving inclusive education (e.g. Florian & Pantić, in press). Research in Europe (EADSNE, 2011) has documented a wide range of initial teacher education courses and professional development of varying lengths and contents, including programmes that aim to prepare mainstream classroom teachers for inclusive education (teacher education for inclusion). As awareness of the lack of teacher preparedness for the multiple and sometimes conflicting demands of inclusive education becomes linked to issues of teacher quality in achieving a good quality education for all, fundamental questions about what teachers need to know and be able to do in order to implement a policy of inclusion are being raised and the implications for teacher education are being considered.

This symposium presents four distinct European research projects that take up the challenge to imagine new possibilities for preparing teachers for the diversity of today’s classrooms in different national contexts: Belgium, England, Italy, and Scotland. Each paper presents significant research that addresses key aspects connected to teacher preparation and the enhancement of inclusion in schools, with a focus on inclusive practice and the effectiveness of teacher training. This symposium aims to engage an international dialogue on recent research conducted in European countries discussing elements linked to professional learning (De Vroey et al., 2016), pre-service teacher preparation for inclusive practice (Argyropoulos, Nikolaraizi, 2009), inclusive attitudes (Camedda & Santi, 2016), and teachers’ agency (Pantić & Florian, 2015) respectively. The discussant will draw on the lessons learned from the research papers highlighting the role that teacher education can play in responding to issues of diversity in schools, and the influence that educational research (Waitoller & Artiles, 2013) plays in developing new theoretical approaches for the preparation of teachers who understand diversity from multiple perspectives that aim to enable all students to flourish as learners. 

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