Research indicates that migration produces a new context for teaching, for which many teachers do not feel sufficiently prepared (Herzog-Punzenberger et al., 2020). In this presentation secondary teacher education curricula are analysed in two countries to ascertain how higher education institutions are preparing secondary teachers for culturally responsive teaching. Austria and Ireland are taken as examples for this analysis, both of which are countries with high levels of cultural, linguistic, and religious diversity in schools (Herzog-Punzenberger et al, forthcoming). The argument builds on a qualitative document analysis of secondary teacher education curricula in both countries which were collected from the respective websites of all Austrian and Irish Higher Education Institutions offering secondary teacher education courses. In total, the database included 39 secondary teacher education curricula from 12 Higher Education Institutions in Ireland and 4 such curricula from four teacher education clusters (including 12 universities and 14 universities of teacher education) from Austria. The categories used for analysis were taken from a study on diversity in Austrian primary teacher education curricula (Schrammel-Leber et al., 2019): the structure of the programme; the title of the course or module; the manner of teaching and assessment (e.g. seminar, lecture, independent study); whether the module is compulsory or optional; the number of ECTS for the module; the level of embedment; requirements for participation; and the description of the course content. The analysis reveals that the curricula of almost all initial teacher education (ITE) programmes in both countries have embraced the concept of diversity. However, “diversity” is a broad concept including a range of different aspects, such as gender, sexual orientation, social milieus, culture, religion etc. as well as differences in school performance. Since most curricula assign only a small amount of ECTS to ‘diversity’ and leave it open what aspects of diversity to focus on, HEI teachers can potentially oscillate between treating many or all aspects of diversity superficially or focussing on specific aspects of diversity. As a consequence, teacher education curricula in both countries appear to reflect migration-related diversity in a marginal way and are far off sequentially building up knowledge and competences of productively responding to the challenges of culturally diverse classrooms.

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