Modern societies are characterized by an increasing cultural and ethnic diversity. This increasing diversity challenges the entire society and requests, inter alia, a reconsideration of the role of education, schools, and teachers. Against this background, it seems urgent to develop an appropriate support both for in-service teachers and for the preparation of pre-service teachers with regard to their roles in culturally diverse schools. This concern was the starting base of a project on which we report in this presentation. The project’s overall aim is to develop a tool which allows teacher educators to move their courses on Intercultural Education from a normatively imbued – and, hence, mostly ineffective – top-down training towards a needs-based approach. Such a tool should provide an empirically gained insight into pre-service and in-service teachers’ beliefs and dispositions regarding Intercultural Education and, therefore, enable an effective adaptation of Teacher Education contents and curricula to the teachers’ needs.

However, the development of such a tool requires a combination of two different approaches which are hardly ever brought together: the tradition of ‘interculturalists’, with its rich and manifold literature on intercultural competencies, and the conceptual approaches of Teacher Education, which focus on school-specific professional demands, i.e., on teacher competencies. Merging these two theoretical traditions promises a stronger foundation for intercultural approaches in Teacher Education and for more effective development of (future) teachers’ intercultural competencies. This can be achieved by nesting the conceptual language of ‘interculturalists’ within the conceptual framework of Teacher Education, in specific within the widely used theoretical model of teachers’ professional competencies developed by Baumert and Kunter (2013). This model defines teachers’ professional competence as an interplay of four main components, required to meet the manifold demands of this profession: (1) professional knowledge; (2) beliefs, values, and goals; (3) motivational orientation; and (4) self-regulation. The basic proposition of this theoretical model is that a teacher is competent only if a sound professional knowledge is related to productive values and beliefs, appropriate motivational orientations, and an adequate self-regulation.

Even though the overall aim of the reported project is to develop a teaching-specific representation of all relevant aspects within this model, the presentation proposed for this ECER focusses on the beliefs-values-and-goals component. It describes how 4 aspects are derived from the wide discourse on intercultural competencies and proposed as key beliefs-values-and-goal elements of a teaching-specific intercultural competence: a) appreciation of cultural diversity (derived from Van der Zee & Van Oudenhoven, 2000; Bhawuk & Brislin, 1992; Kelley & Meyers, 1995; Leutwyler & Meierhans, 2016); b) ethno-relative worldview (derived from Ruben, 1976; Ruben & Kealey, 1979; Wang et al., 2003; Hammer, Bennett & Wiseman, 2003); c) identification with goals of intercultural education (derived from Munroe & Pearson, 2006); and d) attitudes towards integration (derived from Hachfeld et al., 2011). Obviously, the rich and wide discourse on intercultural competencies states many more key elements – but they are considered as parts of either the knowledge dimension (e.g. ‘reflection on normality’), the motivational dimension (e.g. ‘self-efficacy beliefs for dealing with cultural diversity in schools’) or the self-regulation dimension (eg. ‘tolerance of ambiguity’) of the Baumert & Kunter model and are therefore left for another contribution.

The main aim for the contribution proposed for this ECER is presenting the results of this approach. This contribution will show how these 4 key aspects of the beliefs-values-and-goals dimension are operationalized, how the respective scales are psychometrically tested and to what extend these scales are indicators of one single latent concept. In doing so, this contribution presents empirical evidence on the structure of the beliefs-values-and-goals dimension of the suggested theoretical model of teachers’ intercultural competence.

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