Challenges in researching teacher beliefs involve the fact that they are intertwined with teacher knowledge, may not be conscious, and most importantly stand in a reciprocal relationship with teaching practice (Borg, 2001; Santagata & Yeh, 2016). This tight interconnection of beliefs and teaching practice calls for holistic research approaches that explicitly consider the context-dependency of beliefs. With that being said, widely-used methods in research on teacher beliefs such as questionnaires and interviews fall short in capturing crucial information on the teaching. A more context-sensitive research approach for teacher beliefs research provides the construct of teacher noticing. Teacher noticing is the ability to notice and reason about relevant classroom events and has been established as a situation-specific skill that intermediates bidirectionally between professional knowledge and beliefs on one side and classroom practice on the other (Meschede et al., 2017). In this framework, professional knowledge and beliefs are seen to influence teachers’ perception, interpretation and decision-making processes and classroom practice, while at the same time, classroom practice vice versa influences teachers’ professional knowledge and beliefs (Roose et al., 2019; Santagata & Yeh, 2016). This paper presents a mixed-methods study conducted in Austria investigating the influence of a teacher education seminar about multilingualism in education on corresponding beliefs among pre-service teachers of different school subjects. To assess pre-service teachers’ noticing, the data presented in this study were collected with a pre- and post-video analysis task that students (n=52) completed at the beginning and the end of a 14-week seminar. In this task, the stimuls included short video-taped episodes of specific multilingual classroom situations (video vignettes). Such videos provide rich context to elicit information and therefore have been found to be particularly well-suited to gain insights into context-sensitive constructs such as teacher beliefs (Skilling & Stylianides, 2020). Additionally, the study includes data from stimulated recall interviews (n=11) that provide comprehensive insights into participants’ beliefs during the video analysis (Gass & Mackey, 2016). The interviews in combination with the video analysis task give multi-faceted insight on how participants’ beliefs influenced their perception of the teaching context in the videos. The aim of this contribution is to outline the potential of the methodological approach in this study and call for a more context-sensitive and eventually more performance-oriented approach to teacher belief research.

Borg, M. (2001). Teachers’ beliefs. ELT Journal, 55(2), 186–188. https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/55.2.186 Gass, S. M., & Mackey, A. (2016). Stimulated Recall Methodology in Applied Linguistics and L2 Research. New York/London: Routledge. Meschede, N., Fiebranz, A., Möller, K., & Steffensky, M. (2017). Teachers’ professional vision, pedagogical content knowledge and beliefs: On its relation and differences between pre-service and in-service teachers. Teaching and Teacher Education, 66, 158–170. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2017.04.010 Roose, I., Vantieghem, W., Vanderlinde, R., & Avermaet, P. Van. (2019). Beliefs as filters for comparing inclusive classroom situations. Connecting teachers ’ beliefs about teaching diverse learners to their noticing of inclusive classroom characteristics in videoclips. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 56(January), 140–151. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cedpsych.2019.01.002 Santagata, R., & Yeh, C. (2016). The role of perception, interpretation, and decision making in the development of beginning teachers’ competence. ZDM - Mathematics Education, 48(1–2), 153–165. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11858-015-0737-9 Skilling, K., & Stylianides, G. J. (2020). Using vignettes in educational research: a framework for vignette construction. International Journal of Research and Method in Education, 43(5), 541–556. https://doi.org/10.1080/1743727X.2019.1704243