The ethnic and cultural heterogenization of classrooms and the existing achievement gaps create a need to develop teachers’ intercultural competence. Research has shown that teachers’ pedagogical practices in multicultural contexts are largely shaped by their implicit and explicit attitudes and beliefs (Gay 2010). There are many known mechanisms through which teachers’ beliefs affect minority students’ learning. Attitudes and beliefs are generally acknowledged as a core dimension of intercultural competence but there is little consensus on what these beliefs are, or how they can be altered (Berry & Southwell 2011). This paper will present intial findings from a quantitative phase of a mixed methods project which studies teachers’ intercultural competence by drawing on social psychological research on implicit theories of malleability. People have different implicit theories concerning the extent to which traits of individuals and groups are malleable or fixed. These theories have implications for how people make sense of the social world, they predict prejudices and stereotyping, and have been found to be changeable by simple interventions (Carr, Rattan & Dweck 2012). However, theoretical models of intercultural competence and approaches to the development of these competences do not take account of the impact of implicit theories of malleability for intercultural interactions.                                                                                                    Our aim is to investigate the association of teachers’ implicit malleability theories with the affective domain of teachers’ intercultural competence. We chose to operationalize this affective domain in terms of beliefs and orientations which benefits for intergroup relations and intercultural teaching practice have been previously demonstrated: polyculturalist beliefs (POLY) (Rosenthal & Levy 2012), enthusiasm for teaching in the context of diversity (ENT) (Petrović et al. 2016) and teaching for social justice beliefs (SJB) (Ludlow, L. H., Enterline, S. E., & Cochran-Smith, M., 2008). The research question is: do teachers’ implicit incremental theories of malleability predict their polyculturalist beliefs, enthusiasm for teaching culturally diverse students and orientation to teaching for social justice?

A nonprobability sample (N = 360) was collected from Finnish in-service (n=203) and preservice (n=157) teachers with an online survey including measures of implicit theories of individuals (ITI) (Levy et al. 1998) and groups (ITG) (Rydell 2007) as well as of the affective domain of teachers’ intercultural competence (POLY, ENT, SJB, referenced above). Structural equation modelling (SEM) of the teachers’ intercultural competence was conducted with Mplus-program. Since the variables were not normally distributed, we utilized robust maximum likelihood estimation (MLM) as the analysis method. ITP and ITG were treated as dependent, endogenous variables, and POLY, ENT, and SJB as independent, exogenous variables.

The fit of the model (Figure 1) to data was good (RMSEA .048 (90 Percent C.I. 041 .055); CFI/TLI .951/.944; SRMR .045; Χ 2 = 46.95.923, p=.000). ITI had significant direct effects on ITG (β = 0.494, p < .01), ENT (β = 0.101, p < .005) and SJB (β = 0.085, p < .005). ITG had significant direct effects on POLY (β = 0.240, p < .001), and indirect effects through POLY to ENT (β = 0.417, p < .001) and SJB (β = 0.518, p < .01). In the model, variables of SJB (R2 = 0.436, p<.001) and ITG (R2 = 0.331, p< .001) explained the strongest amount of variance. In addition, POLY (R2 = 0.121, p<.01) and ENT (R2 = 0.101, p<.01) had statistically significant impact in the model. However, it should be noticed that the number of participants in this initial analysis was not large enough and therefore model needs to be tested with a larger sample size. Our results bring preliminary evidence of the important role of malleability beliefs and polyculturalist beliefs as the basis of teachers’ intercultural competence. We will continue the study by studying the intercultural competence profiles of Finnish teachers and their manifestation in natural classroom settings. In the future, the increased knowledge of the role of the teachers’ core beliefs should furnish new ideas for teacher interventions and teacher education research. Even simple and short interventions based on teaching about the malleability of individual qualities (based on state-of-the-art knowledge about the plasticity of the human brain) as well as of the malleability of cultures (based on historical knowledge) have successfully influenced implicit theories (e.g. Goldenberg et al. 2017) and could prove a powerful means to develop intercultural competence also in teacher education.

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