Teachers are central to addressing a key challenge for schools in the 21st century, which is to teach different students with a variety of abilities, motivations and backgrounds to succeed in school and later in life. They are faced with a multitude of challenges such as new skills requirements, rapid technological developments and increasing social and cultural diversity. The emerging COVID-19 measures have added new challenges to the EU education systems. More than ever, teachers’ resilience (e.g. Beltman et al., 2011) and adaptability (e.g. Parsons & Vaughn, 2016) are required.

In the symposium we will explore the role of social, emotional competencies, and diversity awareness in this process. Social, emotional competencies, and diversity awareness of school staff have demonstrated positive outcomes on teachers’ well-being (Kozina, 2020), their relationships with others, e.g. students and other teachers (successful teachers’ cross-disciplinary and collaborative approaches (Collie, 2017; Council of the EU, 2014) and have a wide range of educational and social impacts (e.g. better learning and job performance, increased inclusive orientation). Teachers’ professional identity and career development and its underpinning constructs – such as emotions, job satisfaction, professional commitment, autonomy and confidence – are constantly challenged within the changing educational setting. The social, emotional competencies, and diversity awareness can help teachers to take more ownership of their career, learning and development needs, and to manage their professional learning and their careers more efficiently (Goleman et al., 2002; Vorhaus, 2010; Zins et al., 2007). By building on the social, emotional competencies, and diversity awareness teachers can make more appropriate career-related choices within their career management, can recognize their needs better, manage their work-life balance more effectively, balance between professional autonomy and accountability better (Council of the EU, 2017) remain motivated for contnuous professional developpment and to be able to maintain their well-being and prevent burn-out (Jennings & Greenberg, 2009). Additionally, diversity awareness supports teachers’ capacities to meet the needs of diverse classrooms and schools and create more inclusive classrooms.

The symposium brings togethers insights from two European projects The HAND IN HAND: Empowering teachers across Europe to deal with social, emotional and diversity related career challenges and HEAD: Empowering School Principals for Inclusive School Culture. In the first paper Oswald,  Gasteiger-Klicpera, Fredericks and Paleczek present a conceptual framework of the HAND IN HAND project with a focus on its embediness in the needs in the Austrian context. Further on in the  second paper by Dahlstrom, Oskarsson, Eliasson and Norberg the importance to promote diversity awareness for teachers is stressed. In the third paper Vedin and Mlekuž explore how respect for diversity, relationships among teachers and among teachers and students predict supporting school climate using international sample and stressing the role of school leadership and school climate. In the last paper by Štemfel and Kozina policy arrangements of supporting development of teachers’ social, emotional and diversity awareness competencies in international comparative perspective across five European countries are in the focus  bringing in a policy perspective. 

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