In Austria, the teaching profession is facing major changes. Teachers students nowadays achieve a bachelor’s and masters’s degree leading to teaching either pupils age 6-10 (primary education), or to teaching older pupils 10 – 19 (secondary education) independently from future employment at a certain school type. As a result, it becomes the responsibility of all teachers – without exception – to take part in developing an inclusive educational environment. Starting from this commitment of compulsory Inclusive Education for all teacher students as a common base, students can additionally select a personal preferred focus from various options, including Inclusive Education to become an expert in dealing with educational risks and in promoting positive change on all levels – the individual/personal one, the class level represented by various learning communities and the level of school development involving the inner and the outer school communities. The research project PROFIL IP (PROFILE For Inclusive Education) represents a broad project designed over several years as an accompanying research, which regards the motivational aspects, professional relevant traits and interests as well as factors for the choice of the focus Inclusive Education in primary and secondary school teacher training programs at the University College of Teacher Education Styria. The project works with different methodological approaches. In this presentation the study design, results and tendencies should be explained following the focus of universal-diverse orientations of students who decided to become an expert in Inclusive Education (n~100 primary level, n~100 secondary level) compared to students who decided to become an expert in other educational fields, for example natural sciences or social sciences (n~300 primary level, n~200 secondary level). The written survey instrument consists of the FLZ-M (Henrichs & Herschbach, 2000), the M-GUDS (Miville, 1992), the COPE-Inventory (Carver, C. S., Scheier, M. F., & Weintraub, J. K., 1989) and open questions exploring assumptions, expectations and reflections on becoming a teacher in challenging educational environments facing the responsibility to promote inclusion as a decisive resource for learning and democratic participation for ALL pupils. Next to these standardized questionnaires, the survey was completed through sociodemographic questions. The main objective in this research stage is to identify profiles of students, which indicates variables and factors associated with an universal-diverse orientation and the choice of becoming an expert of Inclusive Education and beyond that to detect coping strategies for managing the work with highly heterogeneous groups of learners.

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