Teaching in dynamic and ever changing migration and diversity contexts continues to be challenging. In particular, teachers are called upon to meet the following two educational objectives:

Firstly, equal educational chances should ideally be provided regardless of factors such as social, ethnic, national origin, religious conviction or gender. However, this is still far from reality (OECD, 2023). Although the causes for this inequity are complex, it is also undisputed that teachers are influential with their respective pedagogical orientations (e.g. Weitkämper, 2019 for an overview).

The second objective relates to the broad topic of social belonging and the corresponding social learning: All students should learn to live responsibly in a democratic, diverse society. The Swiss-German "Curriculum 21", for instance, stresses the need to learn mutual respect for a pluralistic, anti-discriminatory society and for social cohesion (D-EDK, 2016). Teachers are challenged in this respect, not only in terms of guiding their students' learning processes, but also in terms of self-reflecting and developing their own attitude.

Both of these concerns are based on the fundamental conviction that all students have equal rights to recognition, both in terms of educational opportunities and in terms of their social belonging (Mantel, 2022). In view of the great importance of these two objectives, the question arises as to how teachers can be effectively supported in their challenges. This, in turn, requires a better understanding of the guiding orientations teachers have and what limits or expands their scope of action.

Previous studies repeatedly show stereotyping and deficit orientations among teachers towards their students, particularly with reference to migration history, culture and/or language, sometimes intersectionally interwoven with socio-economic background and/or gender. In some studies, the differences between various pedagogical orientations have been worked out within the framework of typologies, however, often limited to a focus on teachers’ dealing with cultural difference, particularly what the German speaking area is concerned (see Leutwyler & Mantel, 2015 for an overview; Mantel, forthcoming). The presented study adds to the state of research with an attempt to describe the differences between teachers’ orientations in a rather general way, exploring new ways of looking at the underlying logics and including a deeper understanding of what these orientations are shaped by in terms of their life and professional history. Accordingly, this research is focussed on the following questions: (a) What are the pedagogical orientations among teachers in schools of the migration society, particularly with regard to questions of educational opportunities and questions of social belonging and the corresponding social learning? (b) In what ways are these orientations shaped by the teachers’ life and professional history?

Analysing pedagogical orientations involves questions that relate not only to the "what" of experience and action, but in particular to the "how", i.e. to what underlies experience and action as an orientation. Bohnsack (2014, p. 137) has described this orientation as an "orientation framework" ("Orientierungsrahmen") and thus refers to the implicit knowledge and incorporated patterns of thought and action that make up the modus operandi of action (similar, but not identical to Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habitus’, see details in Mantel, forthcoming). This orientation framework is constantly constituted in the interplay of individual and collective spaces of experience and can therefore be described in the context of group- or milieu-specific characteristics. In order to reconstruct these orientation frameworks, a targeted search for contrasting aspects is required, which ultimately enables a type formation ("sinngenetische Typenbildung"). This type formation can be generalised particularly well if it can be referenced to social specifics ("soziogenetische Typenbildung") (Bohnsack, 2011, p. 42-43). However, the research presented here not only aims to better understand the teachers’ pedagogical orientations, but also to understand the circumstances of their development and change in the personal and professional life course. As this is a research interest that relates to both the "social breadth" as well as the "biographical depth", narrative interviews are used for data collection including a biographical dimension (Schütze, 1983), while the aforementioned qualitative-hermeneutic approach by Bohnsack is applied for the data analysis. In line with this methodological approach, the sample was developed step by step by adding more and more contrasting cases. It comprises 38 primary school teachers in German-speaking Switzerland.

The analyses reveal five ideal-typical structures, which can be described as more or less professionalised in the light of the teacher professionalisation theory by Helsper (2018). Additionally and maybe surprisingly, the question of the teachers’ own experience of recognition explains a lot of the differences between the teachers’ orientations as well as about their professionalisation trajectories. These insights will therefore be reflected upon by drawing on the theory of recognition (Honneth, 1995; for further discussion Balzer, 2007; Bedorf, 2014; Butler, 2001). Surprisingly again, the results indicate that the teachers’ professionalisation comes along with a reduction of stress among these teachers. This insight shall be discussed against the background of similar results from other recent studies (e.g. Lorusso et al., 2024), and horizons for more research in this regard will be outlined.

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