The InFo-TED organization has long been dedicated to promoting the professional development of teacher educators in the most relevant and timely ways. It is now clear that a particular emphasis is needed on equipping teacher educators to fully address issues of social justice in European teacher education, thus enabling their student teachers to teach with and for socially diverse populations.

A European Commission report on teacher educators (2013) identified the importance of such provision, as have many other sources (Lander, 2014; Mills and Ballantyne, 2016; Tanyu et al. 2020). But the Covid-19 pandemic has further revealed and worsened existing inequalities in all societies and education systems, resulting in increased vulnerability for already disadvantaged groups. This makes addressing social justice in and through teacher education even more of an imperative, and that in turn underlines the importance of the provision of relevant professional development for teacher educators. In seeking social justice through education, it is now critical that teacher educators engage fully with issues of class, poverty, gender, ‘race’, disability, sexuality and religion and the complex ways in which the resulting socio-political identities intersect and overlap to create different modes of privilege and discrimination (Lander, 2011; Strand, 2014).

Reflecting those imperatives, a current InFo-TED project aims to to redesign professional development opportunities for teacher educators, further empowering this group to address social justice, inequality and diversity in Europe and beyond. Learning from and with each other’s practices as teacher educators has been central to all InFo-TED activities to date. This emphasis continues to be central in the current project which starts by mapping the existing policies and practices in teaching for diversity in teacher education.

Acknowledging that teacher education across Europe is characterised by both convergences and divergences in terms of content, structure, focus and modes of government intervention, this mapping will take into account the various social, economic, cultural, ethnic and linguistic diversities in each country. We hope it will also lead to identifying common threads of values and practices that might help to develop pan-European frameworks. This symposium reports on the very early stages of this work in just three  countries.

The aims of the symposium are: 1) to sample and report on national policies for addressing social justice and socio-economic diversity in teacher education in our focus countries;  and 2) to consider the broad implications of these policies for teacher educators’ practices and professional development.

Our focus countries for the presentations within this symposium are Ireland, Belgium and Israel, a sample deliberately chosen for the differences in the teacher education systems and their responses to addressing social justice and diversity. In Ireland, for example, the presentation will identify how equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) initiatives in higher education have been conceptualized and implemented in teacher education. From there the presentation identifies gaps in this EDI provision and in consequent professional development needs.

The presentation from Belgium (Flanders) will map the Flemish policy background within which teacher educators deal with diversity. These policies are also used to assess higher education-based teacher educators’ competence to deal with diversity. The paper will then give insights into the preliminary results of a large-scale empirical assessment of Flemish teacher educators’ competence to deal with diversity

National teacher education policies for social justice and diversity in Israel are described and analysed in the third paper. The paper goes on to analyse the provision of one centre for inter-cultural education.

European Commission. (2013) Supporting teacher educators for better learning outcomes. Brussels: European Commission http://ec.europa.eu/education/policy/school/doc/support-teacher-educators_en.pdf Lander, V. (2011) ‘Race, culture and all that: An exploration of the perspectives of White secondary student teachers about race equality issues in their initial teacher education (ITE)’. Race Ethnicity and Education Vol 14 No 3 pp351-364. Lander, V. (2014) Initial Teacher Education: The practice of Whiteness in Race, R. and Lander, V. (2014) Advancing Race, Ethnicity and Education London: Palgrave Macmillan. Mills, C. and Ballantyne, J. (2016) Social justice and teacher education: A systematic review of empirical work in the field. Journal of Teacher Education 67:4. Strand, S. (2014) Ethnicity, gender, social class and achievement gaps at age 16: intersectionality and ‘getting it’ for the white working class. Research Paper in Education. Taylor and Francis / Routledge. Tanyu, M., et al. (2020), "Improving education outcomes for students who have experienced trauma and/or adversity", OECD Education Working Papers, No. 242, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/54d45980-en.