Throughout the last few decades, in Europe, social reality has greatly increased in complexity, and culturally diverse schools have become a reality (Bugno 2018). It is essential that formal education enhances its sensitivity and competence regarding cultural diversity in order to facilitate inclusion and well-being, as well as widespread school success and achievement (Alleman-Ghionda, Agostinetto & Bugno, 2021). Thus, teachers play a crucial role in this process.

The beliefs that teachers hold are relevant for three main reasons: they filter knowledge, influence the definition of a problem, and guide their intentions and actions (Civitillo, Juang, 2019).

According to Fives, Barnes, Chiavola, SaizdeLaMora, Oliveros & Mabrouk-Hattab (2019), beliefs' nature refers to how it is conceptualized, especially in regard to the relationship between knowledge and beliefs. Several types of belief content exist, such as general beliefs (i.e. teaching and learning) and more specific ones (i.e. about diverse student groups). Gay (2015) describes research in the area of teachers' beliefs and attitudes toward cultural diversity as both problematic and promising. Indeed, because of their ambivalent nature, it is possible to detect "a significant gap in the body of knowledge" (p. 344). Moreover, these authors affirm that teacher educators should consider the importance of teacher beliefs on teacher learning when designing and implementing learning experiences for preservice and in-service teachers.

In Italy, in order to become a primary teacher is necessary to enroll in the degree course in Primary Teacher Education: it is a combined Bachelor's and Master's degree 5 years long. One of the fundamental first year’s courses is Intercultural Education.

In the Italian context, Intercultural Education is in general understood as a pedagogical project inherent to the multicultural environment and oriented to four main proposes human rights, social justice, decentralization, and dialogue and mediation.

At the University of Padova the aim of the course is to provide the fundamental elements for understanding and framing the multicultural dimension from an educational perspective. The lectures intend to orientate towards the development of an initial intercultural competence. Moreover, the main cognitive and reflective elements relate on one hand to the theoretical constructs of intercultural education, and on the other, to the implications of cultural diversity at school.

Given these premises, the paper presents a pilot study aimed at investigating the beliefs of future teachers on the concept of cultural diversity before and after the Intercultural Education course.

The pilot research questions are: how do future teachers represent cultural diversity? What are their beliefs of cultural diversity? (How) do they evolve/change? Therefore, the main focuses are 2: future teachers' beliefs of cultural diversity and their representations.

To collect data on prospective teachers' notions of cultural diversity and representations, we ask 200 students to create a multimodal (image/text) sketch of what they understand of cultural diversity at the start and conclusion of the Intercultural Education course. The students are given 20 minutes to complete the drawings and are allowed to use any material they wanted. After that students follow 30 hours of the course in which they are familiarised with the main principles of Intercultural Education. We will examine the differences between the representational models from the beginning and the end of the course to what they express, and how and to what degree these representations differ. Building on the work of Kuttner et al. (2020), we will investigate how multimodality elicited unexpected insights and revealed information that would not have been visible if the task had been completed in only one mode (e.g. text). Based on their idea that sketching, drawing, redrawing, and inking are processes of refinement and choice, we want to determine what kinds of changes in representation choices occurred after the course (p.199). Finally, we will examine the links between modes and how, in Lewis's words (2001), they 'interanimate' with one another. Using a multimodal approach can help us gain a more comprehensive picture of the impact of the courses on teachers' perceptions of cultural diversity and representations.

The paper will provide suggestions for multimodal methodologies for the understanding of Cultural Diversity beliefs of future teachers thanks to initial education. The goal is to complete the intersubjective analysis of the qualitative data through the definition and description of specific phases process in a context of productive team cooperation. Specifically, the difference between the data collected before and after the Intercultural Education course is considered. The representational models are already collected in the last months: they are now about to be organized and shared to become the object of analysis and reflection by the research group. The outcomes of this in-depth analysis will be shared and discussed with the audience during ECER in Glasgow in August 2023.

Agostinetto L., Alleman-Ghionda C., Bugno L. (2021). L’intercultura forma la scuola. Dalla teoria alla formazione in servizio come ricerca-azione. In Lisa Stillo (Ed), La scuola è aperta a tutti. Modelli ed esperienze di formazione docenti e dirigenti nel master FAMI Organizzazione e gestione delle istituzioni scolastiche in contesti multiculturali (pp. 69-86). Roma TrE-Press. Bugno L. (2018). Clues to The Winds Directions: Sailing on Teachers' Beliefs About Cultural Diversity. Results from A Semi-Structured Interview in The Italian Context. Studia Paedagogica, 4/2018, pp. 129-144. Causey, A. (2017). Drawn to see: Drawing as an ethnographic method. University of Toronto Press. Civitillo S., Juang L. (2020). How to best prepare teachers for multicultural schools: Challenges and perspectives. In P. F. Titzmann e P. Jugert (Eds.). Youth in superdiverse societies: Growing up with globalization, diversity, and acculturation (pp. 285-301). London: Routledge. Fives, H., Barnes, N.C., Chiavola, C., SaizdeLaMora, K., Oliveros, E., & Mabrouk-Hattab, S. (2019). Reviews of Teachers’ Beliefs. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Kuttner, P. J., Weaver-Hightower, M. B., & Sousanis, N. (2021). Comics-based research: The affordances of comics for research across disciplines. Qualitative Research, 21(2), 195-214. Lewis, D. (2012). Reading contemporary picturebooks: Picturing text. Routledge.