Teachers are a key component of the university community when it comes to creating an inclusive culture through their research, and especially through their teaching and the use of inclusive pedagogies (Stentiford & Koutsouris, 2021). In these professional practices, it is likely that the relevant competencies are not only those specific to their teaching and research functions, but also those related to the personal sphere (Moral-Mora et al., 2021). Thus, the beliefs, attitudes, personality, and life experience of university teachers would be associated with inclusive professional performance, which would require a theoretical exploration of the profile of competencies that is not limited to technical-professional dimensions. This is the thesis that the paper presented here sets out to confirm through a model that considers a set of personal variables, predictive of the teachers' inclusive actions in teaching and other areas of practice.

The Dual-Process Motivational Model developed by John Duckitt (2001; Duckitt & Sibley, 2017), which explains attitudes of prejudice, may be suited to understanding the inclusive beliefs, attitudes, and practices of teachers insofar as prejudice negatively predicts inclusive judgements and behaviours (Kende et al., 2021), as well as attitudes towards immigrant students (Pace et al., 2022). Specifically, Duckitt's model states that openness is a personality trait that negatively anticipates the ideological attitude of right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) which, in turn, would have a relevant explanatory effect on prejudice toward groups perceived as threatening. Agreeableness would be the trait that predicts, at low levels, social dominance orientation (SDO), which, in turn, would anticipate prejudice towards groups who are devalued in terms of status and power. In both pathways, the direct influence of personality on prejudice is weak, but has a more important indirect effect through attitudes (Duckitt & Sibley, 2017). What differentiates these two paths is the perception of the group, which has been found to be associated with certain covariables of prejudice (Bergh & Brandt, 2022). Within higher education, greater attention is paid to women, persons with disabilities, those belonging to ethnic minority groups, and to students from a low socio-economic background (Alvarez-Castillo et al., 2021), groups considered to be disadvantaged or vulnerable. This perception of vulnerability reinforces the path of agreeableness and SDO as part of the cognitive, attitudinal, and behavioural process of university teachers with respect to social minorities.

Along with personality and ideological attitudes, another personal characteristic that might be related to inclusive practices is the perception of discrimination that many teachers themselves may experience. In certain minority groups that perceive a conflict between their identity and that of the majority group, perceived discrimination is positively associated with the intent to avoid contact or to act aggressively against the outgroup. However, university teachers in Spain, although they may feel discriminated against in one of their identities, enjoy a good level of autonomy in the exercise of their profession and a prestigious social status, in addition to a normative environment favourable to inclusion, which could reverse the sense of negative reactivity in the case of perceived discrimination. Results from the study by Chung et al. (2017), who took Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behaviour (1991) and used a sample of professionals from the general population, supported a certain positive association between perceived discrimination and attitudes towards diversity.

According to the aforementioned evidence and theoretical models, the current study hypothesised that the path of agreeableness and SDO, as well as perceived discrimination, will predominantly anticipate the beliefs, attitudes, and practices with which teachers address diversity.

DESIGN. The study was cross-sectional, survey-based, and aimed at confirming the predictive relationships between personality, ideological attitudes, perceived discrimination, and diversity beliefs, attitudes and behaviours by means of structural equation modelling in order to account for the percentage of variance explained in the teaching staff's inclusive practices, as well as the dominant predictive path. SAMPLE. The final sample consisted of 613 university lecturers from eight Spanish public university institutions (universities of Cordoba, Valencia, Seville, Complutense de Madrid, Pablo de Olavide, Cadiz, Jaen, and UNED) who agreed to respond to all the survey instruments. The sample composition was relatively gender-balanced, with 47.3% of men and 52.6% of women, and a mean age of 46.30 (SD = 11.00). The average length of employment in the institution was 14.30 years (SD = 11.18). INSTRUMENTS. All the instruments and the data collection procedure were approved by the Ethics Committee of the University of Córdoba. The battery of questions consisted of five sections: 1) Socio-demographic information and perceived discrimination (ad hoc instrument); 2) Scale of Beliefs, Attitudes, and Practices of Attention to Diversity for University Teachers (Ramos-Santana et al., 2021); 3) Right-Wing Authoritarianism Scale (Altemeyer, 1981); 4) Social Dominance Orientation Scale (Pratto et al., 1994); 5) Neo-Personality Inventory-R (Costa & McCrae, 1992/2008). PROCEDURE. An invitation was sent to the teaching staff of the eight public universities mentioned above in a mass e-mail that included a link to the survey. Before administering the self-reporting instruments, informed consent was obtained, presenting the survey and requesting voluntary participation, informing the participants about the research, that they were free to leave at any time, assuring them their participation was confidential and voluntary, and informing them of the scientific use to which the research findings would be put. The battery of tests was designed with the free software application LimeSurvey. Two weeks after the first message, the invitation was reiterated as a reminder. The data collection process was closed five weeks after the first submission. DATA ANALYSIS. Once the data were transferred to SPSS (v28), preparatory, descriptive and correlational analyses were performed on the variables. Subsequently, the hypothesised model was tested by means of structural equations analysis with Amos, using bootstrap sampling procedures together with the maximum likelihood estimation method. The decision on the goodness of fit of the model to the data was made on the basis of a joint assessment of five indices (CFI, NNFI, SRMR, RMSEA, χ2/df).

The results confirmed the predictive capacity of certain personal variables on beliefs and attitudes towards diversity, and of these on the inclusive practices of university teachers, particularly in relation to research activities, teacher training, and innovation in addressing diversity, to the point of explaining 53% of its variance, solely on the basis of personal characteristics. In accordance with the predictions of the Dual-Process Motivational Model (Duckitt, 2001; Duckitt & Sibley, 2017), a dual path of personality and ideological attitudes effects on beliefs, attitudes, and practices of diversity was identified, with one of the pathways being dominant. The Duckitt's model associates the path of agreeableness and SDO with prejudice towards low-status/disadvantaged groups, and this is precisely the route that is confirmed as dominant in the study, having collected data in a university setting, a context in which the majority of minority groups are considered to be disadvantaged, and not as threatening or dissident. In the case of perceived discrimination, the results showed that teachers who had felt discriminated against informed on the adoption of more inclusive practices and, at the same time, expected more committed leadership than they perceived in their institutions. The results obtained would suggest two applications immediately. The first of these concerns the competency profile of university teaching staff. More holistic competency frameworks are needed to go beyond specific teaching competencies and include personal characteristics associated with attitudes and practices for addressing diversity. A second pedagogical application would refer to diversity training, an area in which consistent knowledge is not yet available (Devine & Ash, 2022). Certainly, diversity predictors as personality and ideological attitudes are fairly stable characteristics, but there is also evidence in favour of some intra-individual variability caused by contextual stimulation that produces state changes. Therefore, predictors of inclusive practices are also trainable.

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