In recent years, diversity and inclusion became an important part of the education policy agenda in Austria, where the proportion of migrant students is higher compared to other European countries (Herzog-Punzenberger, 2019). However, education research in the last two decades revealed that inclusion and equity remain major challenges in the Austrian education system. For example, large scale assessments of educational achievement consistently show that students with an immigrant background significantly underachieve in education (OECD, 2019; Wendt et al., 2020; Wendt & Schwippert, 2017). Additionally, segregation between schools on the basis of socio-economic status and migrant background is becoming more widespread (Breit et al., 2018). Especially in urban areas, classrooms become increasingly heterogeneous and multicultural, so that teachers need greater support. There are indications that the schools operating in challenging circumstances (Schwerpunktschulen) are encountering difficulties with recruiting and retaining high quality teachers and that their teachers more often lack subject specific knowledge (European Commission, 2019).

In this increasingly heterogeneous and multicultural context, teachers need to be well prepared and supported to deal with diversity and inclusion in classrooms. Although teachers generally feel confident teaching in a multicultural class, several young teachers report that preparation for teaching in a multicultural environment was not part of their teacher education. Against this background, the study aims to describe recent policy developments that aim to promote diversity and inclusion in the Austrian teacher education system, focusing on how initial teacher education (ITE) curricula prepare future teachers for multicultural classrooms. The study will firstly provide an overview of the diversity and inclusion policy environment in the Austrian schooling system and highlight major challenges in this context on the basis of contemporary research studies. It will then systematically review the approach taken by Austria in preparing prospective teachers to take better account of inclusion and diversity. In order to do this, we will first discuss recent teacher education policies in both the European and national context. We will then discuss recent policy initiatives of relevance to teacher education with regard to diversity and inclusion, and review the extent to which they are reflected in the ΙΤΕ curricula of the country’s four teacher education clusters. The focus of the analysis is on ITE curricula for secondary school teachers which is the level where teacher education providers collaborate with each other to implement the latest teacher education reform in Austria.

Data were gathered through the methods of document review and curriculum analysis. Documents included official policy documents and reports published by official government bodies, international organisations or higher education institutions. Specifically, documents produced in the context of the Teacher Education New (PädagogInnenbildung Neu) reform were examined deductively with regard to references on inclusion and diversity. The notion of “social dimension” was also included in the search, since this is a particularly relevant dimension for higher education pointing towards inclusion and diversity. Once the document review was completed and the major policy recommendations were mapped, we undertook a curriculum analysis of the ITE curricula (at both BA and MA levels) developed and utilised at each of the four teacher education clusters in Austria. These clusters were organised in the context of the latest teacher education reform to enhance the collaboration between universities and university colleges of teacher education and include: South-East Cluster (Burgenland, Styria, Carinthia), North-East Cluster (Vienna, Lower Austria), Middle Cluster (Upper Austria, Salzburg), and West Cluster (Tyrol, Vorarlberg). In our analysis of ITE programmes, we took courses as analytical units and coded them using a deductive approach, building on the model of pedagogical content knoweldge proposed by Shulman (1986) and distinguishing between subject knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge and subject methodology. The deductive analysis aimed to identify references to the notions of inclusion and diversity in the course description. With differences between the clusters, we came to the conclusion that the relevant courses make up only about 5 % of overall study time.

In recent years, Austria undertook important steps to reform its teacher education system. To cope with the challenge of an increasingly diverse student population, aspiring policy initiatives aimed to introduce diversity and inclusion for both higher education in general and ITE in particular. A national action plan for promoting the social dimension in higher education provides a framework to improve the representation of students from diverse socio-economic and cultural backgrounds in ITE. Additionally, the Teacher Education New reform promoted the integration of diversity related competences along with relevant ITE content as necessary for future teachers. Although the implementation of ITE curricula has started only recently, our analysis of them across the different teacher education clusters has highlighted some trends for the training of secondary school teachers. Overall, it seems that ITE curricula contribute rather weakly in creating learning opportunities for future teachers to gain content knowledge and acquire competences relevant to diversity and inclusion. These results concur with the findings of Herzog-Punzenberger (2019), who argues that the majority of Teacher Education New curricula dealing with the training of secondary school teachers in Austria have few courses that are relevant to inclusion and diversity. Apart from specialisations offered and few initiatives at some universities, we can argue that, given the little coverage of relevant subjects (about 5%), the Austrian education system fails to systematically train a basic stock of experts which is necessary to respond to current challenges. It is therefore not surprising that also the recent TALIS survey in 2018 reveals that the majority of teachers under 25 years of age, i.e., who graduated with a teaching degree between 2015 and 2018, report that they don’t feel sufficiently prepared to teach in diverse classrooms. This demonstrates the importance of in-service training in this area.

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