The question of equality within school systems is being discussed with new fervour as social cohesion in European society seems under duress. This brings on the demand for changes in the training of teachers as they are seen as the body that can offer the most immediate remedy for discrimination within the school system, which can be a way to promote social equality within the whole of society. An up-to-date understanding of diversity and its consequences is paramount for teachers to tackle this task.

Looking at material collected during a course on “diversity in school” as part of a teacher training degree (Bachelor level), we tried to understand how students' perception of diversity is being influenced by the presentation and discussion of scientific findings on diversity and the consequences they should have for teachers' actions. The insights are used to draw conclusions on how to make the teaching of critical educational research more effective.

Dealing with diversity is an essential part of professionalization, which, however, poses multiple challenges for students' identities: becoming aware of being themselves a person with a diversified identity, and becoming competent in dealing with others' diversity through a so-called "glocal" competence that enables future teachers in diverse classrooms to negotiate, adapt, and collaborate in a super diverse environment while maintaining local attitudes (Madden, 2022).

Teacher training for dealing with diversity often targets an intersection between personality and future profession. Reflection on behavior towards students and the recognition of needs in them necessarily mean a confrontation with personal beliefs and traits. The training as a teacher, however, also has a dimension that transcends the individual level. Teachers and those studying to be such become a community of practice (abbr. CoP, Wenger, 1998) as they develop their skills and negotiate strategies together. The CoP develops into a social group with boundaries of membership and a social identity (Hornsey, 2008). Such a social identity can be described as a professional identity since it supersedes the boundaries of the members that physically meet and know each other to include ideas of what members of the teaching profession are like (Ashcraft, 2013).

For teachers, this means they accept the tacit knowledge of their ingroup as true to become full members of the CoP: they accept the narratives of the diversity discourse as it develops around schools through political documents and professional discourse. In the school system, this discourse often is built on a perception of reality that is no longer in tune with social realities: it still assumes students who are able-bodied, monolingual, and with only one, Christian-based middle-class culture as a background to be the majority, the benchmark of normality (Schmidt/Wächter, 2023). This has far-reaching consequences for teacher students. To be accepted into the CoP of teachers, they must subscribe to this perception of reality, which is at odds with the basis of much of the scientific findings they are presented with in training. Their peers expect them to react to situations in line with ingroup convictions, for example, with regard to labeling and consequent discrimination of student groups because of ingroup narratives. This produces a dissonance between professional training and practice.

The data for this study was collected during a non-compulsory Bachelor seminar. Students (n = 35) were asked over a 14-week period to reflect online on topics covered in the course that week. The material was collected and interpreted regarding what way the research presented in class integrated into the students' reflections over the course of the seminar. Following Nowell et al. (2017), a thematic analysis was conducted. The interpretation was performed first independently by each author, then discussed and synchronized.

The findings suggest that students go into the course with beliefs about diversity that are firmly rooted in professional and public diversity discourse. As the teaching progresses, they show in their responses that they understood and processed the research presented. Strikingly, however, when asked to reflect on future professional behavior and confronted with situations from the teaching profession, they fall back into reasonings that show connections to diversity discourse and not the research presented. It is the argument of the paper that these findings show the limitations of mere scientific instruction in teacher training. Instead, students must be helped to develop a professional identity that does not see the adaptation of scientific research into their professional beliefs as opposed to CoP membership. Some tentative suggestions as to how that can be achieved are posed in the paper. They seem transferrable to other (national) settings of training.

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