While school classrooms in many countries across the globe have experienced large increases in  cultural and linguistic diversity over the past two decades, the demographic profile of the teaching workforce has remained relatively static (Santoro & Forghani-Arani, 2015). This trend is evident across many European countries, such as Italy, Austria and the Republic of Ireland and is also present in Australia, a multicultural society where the teaching force has remained largely Anglo-ethnic (Cruickshank, 2004; Han & Singh, 2007). The rapid rate of demographic change in student populations has led to challenges for education systems. Of particular concern, is that the educational outcomes of some groups of culturally diverse students lag behind those of the dominant mainstream culture (Santoro & Forghani-Arani, 2015). One reason attributed to the disparity in educational achievement of some groups of students is that many teachers are ill-prepared to teach students from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds (Darling-Hammond, 2012) with teacher education identified as failing to adequately prepare preservice teachers to be culturally responsive practitioners. It is argued that, as part of teacher education, preservice teachers need to be provided with opportunities to consider how their own positioning within a culture shapes their possible selves (Markus & Nurius, 1986) as teachers who will engage the diversity of learners in their classrooms (Tangen, Henderson, Alford, Hepple, Alwi, Shaari & Alwi, 2015).

While there is a plethora of research exploring preservice teachers’ preparedness for teaching students with disabilities, Florian (2012) identifies that teacher education must also consider the increasing cultural and linguistic diversity presented in classrooms. This change in narrative creates a change in intercultural sensitivity, which is identified as an individual’s attitudes and understandings of differences specific to their worldview and the worldview of others (Bennett, 1986, 2004). Worldviews encompass awareness of one’s subjective cultural context and acknowledges how individuals discriminate phenomena in the world. Bennett’s (1986) Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity (DMIS) measures the orientations towards cultural differences from ethnocentrism to ethnorelativism. Ethnocentrism describes the orientation where one’s own culture is experienced as central to reality in some way and where individuals seek ways to avoid cultural differences. Ethnorelativism describes the orientation where one’s culture is experienced in the context of other cultures, where one’s culture is ‘experienced as just one of a number of equally complex worldviews and where individuals seek ways to understand and accept cultural differences (Hammer et al., 2003, p. 425). The underlying principle of the DMIS is that as one gains more complex and sophisticated experiences of cultural difference, the more one’s potential intercultural competence becomes.

In this study we focus on the ethnorelativisim and/or ethnorelativism constructs in exploring how intercultural experiences may impact on preservice teachers’ possible selves (Markus & Nurius, 1986) as teachers of diverse learners. We posit that preservice teachers’ worldviews have an impact on their perceptions of their possible selves as inclusive educators. With its origins in educational psychology, possible selves theory has been used to examine the motivations, affect and behaviours of teachers in different educational contexts (Yuan, 2016), and how individuals navigate important life transitions such as preparing for a new career (Hamman et al., 2010).   To our knowledge, these two theories have not been considered together before in understanding preservice teachers’ perceptions of themselves as teachers.  

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