In all European nation states, migration is a widespread and still increasing phenomenon. This phenomenon challenges teachers and, in consequence, teacher education to meet specific requirements (cf. European Commission 2017). For example, prospective teachers need to become familiar with multilingual pedagogies. Nonetheless, the development of a professional and reflective stance toward issues of migration, social inequalities and language(s) is equally important (Skerret 2015, Gomez/Johnson Lachuk 2017, Dirim/Mecheril 2018, Gottuck et al. 2019). Our interest in this specific kind of reflective competency can be productively linked with the increasing research on reflective competencies in teacher education and professionalisation in recent years (cf. Leonhard/Rihm 2011, Rissanen/Kuusisto/Kuusisto 2016, Amzat/Valdez 2017, Guardiera/Podlich/Reimer 2018, Bade et al. 2018). In this context, research focuses on the theoretic modelling of reflective competencies as well as on the role of these competencies in teaching and teacher education. Our contribution draws on this research, but we are interested in a very specific aspect of reflective competencies: the competency to reflect attitudes and one’s own professional involvement in issues of migration, multilingualism and social inequalities in education systems.

The project DaZu (“Aushandlungen von Zugehörigkeiten” - Negotiating Social Memberships) aims to gain insights into the structure and qualities of reflective competencies of prospective teachers in the so-called ‘DaZ-Modul’ (German for students with migration background). In 2009, this module was implemented in teacher education on a national level in Germany. It is mandatory for all teacher-training students in some of Germany’s federal states, including the state where our project is located, and facultative in all of the other states. The module provides an introduction to multilingual pedagogies. At our institution, this introduction is framed by stimuli for reflecting one’s own attitudes towards and one’s own professional involvement in issues of multilingualism, migration and social justice.

The leading question of our study is: In which way and to which extent do students in this module reflect on their understanding of multilingualism and their attitudes towards multilingualism, migration and social justice? Do they recognize, for instance, how social membership can be constructed, assigned or denied in the context of multilingualism, migration and German as a second language?

Our project is of particular importance in the overall European context where all countries are influenced and shaped by migration and multilingualism. Therefore, including reflective competencies towards issues related to migration and multilingualism in teacher education is crucial for the future education and professionalisation of teachers in Europe.

A mixed methods approach was taken, combining the collection and analysis of both quantitative and qualitative data. For the quantitative part of the study, surveys were conducted in the DaZ-Modul. These surveys will have been in place for three semesters when ECER 2019 takes place and will result in about n= 1500, reaching the whole student population engaged in the module’s lectures during the period of the study. Besides using descriptive statistics to gain knowledge about the student population (such as their own multilingualism, age or previous field experiences as teacher-training students), we use correlation statistics to analyse variations between different student groups. The second part of our data consists of 125 autobiographical texts that students wrote as an assigment at the end of their seminars in the DaZ-Modul. The assigment included a prompt that focused on the students’ individual encounters and experiences with multilingualism and multilingual speakers. They were also asked to reflect on and qualitatively evaluate their learning processes in and during the DaZ-Modul. Using a Grounded Theory Methodology approach (Strauss/Corbin 1991, Charmaz 2006), we first developed categories inductively by open coding and comparative analysis between contrasting and similar autobiographical texts. The goal of this first level of our study is to describe and analyse the structure of the reflective competencies displayed by the students. Our statistical data of the first part of the study are used to contextualise the categories with traits of the overall student population. On a second level, the categories will be critically related and further differentiated by relating and comparing them to current theoretical models of reflective competencies (Bade et al. 2018). Finally, we aim to develop a model of reflective competencies in the context of multilingualism, migration and second language acquisition. This will serve as a base for further research and developments in teacher education such as the further development of the DaZ-Modul’s curriculum.

Our findings from the survey show that students acknowledge the societal reality of multilingual and multicultural classrooms. The data also show the students' high acceptance of the DaZ-Modul as compulsory during their studies. The “feminization” of teacher education (as expressed by Drudy 2008) is clearly visible, as is the lower amount of everyday multilingual persons in contrast to the rest of society (Scheller, Isleib, Sommer 2013). Our findings of the autobiographical texts point toward incongruencies within the students’ reflective stances, which challenges and questions a developmental, stage-like model of reflexive competencies. Multilingual students tend to reflect on how they have been perceived in a deficit-focused way during school, but it seems to be harder to reflect on how university-taught contents position them as deficit others. Monolingual students show a broad range of views toward multilingualism, but we rarely find students that seem to be able to fully reflect their own positionality in an education system that they might deem injust. What we find most are beginning – and often conflicting – negotiations of their own views on multilingualism and social membership. Reflective competencies could thus appear as the ability to recognise and question one's own and others' attitudes and ascriptions.

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