In times of increasing numbers of migrants and refugees worldwide, Europe is a central destination. Looking into the professional backgrounds and competencies of adult migrants, an unidentified number of teachers has also come to Europe. The possibilities of acknowledgment of their qualifications into the country of immigration vary according to the respective national migration policy and the structures of teacher education. The symposium will introduce qualification programs for newly immigrated and/or refugee teachers in Austria, Germany and Sweden.

In terms of existing qualifications for teachers from different national backgrounds, these programs aim at multiple goals:

• They should help to introduce, integrate and enable to include into the education system of the host country as a labour market. In this case, the programs have to support the (re)-professionalisation processes of teachers undergoing a school system change.

• By doing so the host country can profit from the professional background of these teachers, especially under the conditions of teacher shortage. These include language proficiency, their knowledge of different school systems as well as experience related to their migration.

• In addition, some of the teachers will not or may not permanently stay in the host countries. In this case, the program is a further qualification for these teachers. After returning to their countries of origin, often former war zones, the knowledge gained can help to rebuild the education system in crisis regions.

The symposium addresses the situation of recently immigrated teachers in terms of inclusion and exclusion. Thus elaborating the limbo in which many highly-skilled recently immigrated professionals find themselves in: Navigating between the wish to actively contribute to their inclusion and sometimes being held back by formal or structural barriers (exclusion). Inclusion and exclusion as a ‘multifaceted conceptual instrument’ (Stichweh 2005: 7) are seen as a linked pair, used for analytical, political and/or socio-critical purposes (Gertenbach 2008: 309). The symposium uses this perspective to examine the range of current programs for recently arrived displaced teachers in three Western-European countries and a long-term program from Israel. As a heuristic, different dimensions of participation and exclusion are addressed:

• The field of tension between integration efforts and expectations and exclusion mechanisms of migrants in society as a discursive frame for these programs,

• the social responsibility and expectation to enable inclusion through gainful employment,

• embedding the topic of newly arrived teachers in the administrative structures of the school systems,

• the practical possibilities to use the existing expertise of new immigrants for the respective educational system of their host countries,

• dynamics of integrating and revising the own teachers’ beliefs in the process of (re-)professionalisation within the programs,

• focus on whether and, if so, what changes schools undergo as organisations when including these teachers.

After an introduction into the topic, papers from Anki Bengtsson and Larissa Mickwitz (Sweden), Michelle Proyer and Gertraud Kremsner (Austria) and Henrike Terhart (Germany) will present current research on programs for recently arrived (refugee) teachers. The discussant Elena Makarova (Switzerland) will look at the presented programs with a European perspective. The findings are questioned with regard to commonalities and differences between the different national contexts, and basic conditions of success are discussed.

The symposium aims at not only giving an overview of programs in three European countries. It also stresses the idea, that the recognition of the pedagogical expertise of teachers from different countries has the potential for the often nationally narrowed perspective on teacher education and school development in European countries.

Stichweh, R. (2005): Inklusion und Exklusion. Studien zur Gesellschaftstheorie. Bielefeld: transcript. Gertenbach, L. (2008): Ein »Denken des Außen« – Michel Foucault und die Soziologie der Exklusion. In Soziale Systeme 14 (2), 308-328.