The opportunities to work as a teacher with a foreign teacher training degree in Germany are limited. Previous research on teachers from abroad focuses on the various barriers these teachers have to overcome to be recognised and work as teachers in a different country again. They face multiple challenges because their university education usually does not meet the requirements of the German teacher-training programme (Terhart, Elshof & Preuschoff 2020). However, currently the school authorities in some federal states of Germany recognise the potentials of the so-called internationally trained teach-ers to contribute to the German school system. To support these teachers to find their way into the education system as a labour market, few university qualification pro-grammes for recently immigrated refugee teachers are offered since 2016. The paper takes up the question of how the process of trying to re-enter the profession to work as a teacher again can be understood as a biographical professional develop-ment task (Terhart 1995; Fabel-Lamla 2018). By using the concept of transnationalisation (Pries 2010; Glick-Schiller 2010) it is stressed that the training of teachers - as school sys-tems in general - are mostly organised on a national or federal state-specific basis. Based on the perspective of professionalisation as an ongoing biographical development task, teachers from abroad, that are attending a one-year requalification programme for refu-gee teachers, were ask to participate in an interview study carried out in a pre-post de-sign. The 19 interviews before and after participating in the programme were analysed by using the process of comparative theoretical coding and conceptualisation of the Grounded Theory Methodology (Glaser & Strauss 2008; Berg & Milmeister 2008). The developed theoretical model of limited reach (Grounded Theory) shows that the cen-tral task for refugee teachers is to manage to keep up the hope of achieving the re-entry into the profession - despite all barriers. By emphasising universal teaching skills con-cerning pedagogical interaction and specialist subject knowledge, the interviewed teach-er counter the formal de-professionalisation. In combination with the positive feedback of further professionalisation in Germany, the participants emphasise their flexibility and willingness to accomplish. It is argued that the biographical perspective, on professional-isation leads to a better understanding of transnational teachers (Soong 2017) and their strategies to refer to their professionalism to clearly oppose the impression of de-professionalisation from the outside.

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