In recent years, social change processes have exerted significant pressure on schools and education systems worldwide. Factors such as increasing digitalization, demands for inclusive education, and global challenges like inflation, the COVID-19 pandemic, migration, and global conflicts have created new challenges for educational institutions. These transformations are often accompanied by legal amendments at various levels, ranging from international law (e. g. UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities), constitutional regulations (e. g. constitutional right to education in the individual states), to internal administrative policies (e.g. reform of curricula). Teachers and schools must navigate this complex legal landscape, adapting to changes and ensuring compliance with evolving standards. The increasing relevance of legal considerations in education is acknowledged, emphasizing the need for professionalization in this domain (Avenarius, 2019a, 2019b).

With regard to teacher professionalization (Clandinin & Husu, 2017a, 2017b), legal education assumes a critical role: Teachers must not only be well-versed in pedagogical strategies but also possess a profound understanding of the legal frameworks governing education. The term “legal professionalization” encapsulates this imperative need for educators to continuously enhance their legal knowledge and skills. It involves the cultivation of a professional identity that recognizes the role of law in shaping educational practices and policies.  

However, despite the growing importance of legal aspects in the teaching profession, law still represents a “blind spot” (Füssel, 2020) in university teacher training. There is also hardly any theoretical or empirical work on the legal professionalization of teachers. While there are some practical guides for school implementation (e.g., Stedrak & Mezzina, 2022), there is a lack of substantial empirical foundational research on teachers' legal literacy and its antecedent, legal professionalization.

Against this background, this paper aims to understand the extent to which legal topics are integrated into the curriculum of the university phase of teacher training and asks with focus on Germany: Which legal topics are covered by the intended and implemented curriculum of the university phase of teacher training in Germany?

By undertaking a comparative analysis, we seek to systematize the legal education provided and unravel how curriculum development responds to the prevailing social challenges mentioned earlier.

The study was conducted in four phases: Preliminary study – document analysis (A) – written survey (B) – content analysis (C). This paper focuses on phases A, B, and C. Phase A aimed to survey the intended curriculum of university teacher training in Germany. For this purpose, a document analysis (Bowen, 2009) was carried out on the websites of all teacher training universities in the 16 federal states of Germany (n = 109). The process involved four steps: identification of teacher training universities and associated schools of education (step 1); identification of the educational science training offered at the respective universities (step 2); identification of the legal bases applicable to teacher training in the respective federal state (at constitutional, statutory, and legal ordinance levels) and at the respective universities (at statute level) (step 3). The resulting text corpus includes all legal bases of teacher training at constitutional, statutory, legal ordinance, and statute levels with a focus on the educational science study components, assuming legal training content (full survey; n = 611; valid for the winter semester 2020/21). Phase B, the written survey, aimed to record the implemented curriculum at individual universities. To this end, all schools of education nationwide (n = 69; response rate 90%) were sent a written survey with questions about the extracurricular legal training on offer. The resulting evaluation corpus comprised 62 survey results. The content analysis (Phase C) was based on content-structuring content analysis (Mayring, 2015). Firstly, all 611 documents from Phase A were manually searched for legal references. The 1,001 references to a total of 107 legal provisions identified in this way were then differentiated inductively according to legal topics as the main content dimension of the study (Kuckartz & Rädiker, 2023). The categories identified in this process are applied to the 62 results of the supplementary survey and validated. Based on the category system created in this way with the associated coding rules, the entire material is completely double-coded by a second scientific employee (agreement: 98.8%, Krippendorff's alpha: 0.988; limit values according to Krippendorff, 2019).

In 109 of 611 documents, legal themes were encoded (31.3%), resulting in 1,001 scrutinized passages (multiple passages per document) with 1,478 encoded instances (multiple legal themes per passage). Ten overarching legal themes with 30 sub-themes were inductively delineated. Beyond the central category of school law (n = 377) and a comprehensive category for miscellaneous legal aspects of subject teaching (n = 73), these themes can be categorized into three groups. The General-Law-group incorporates all educational content referencing legal sciences (n = 117) or law/legal system (n = 89) broadly. The Legal-Fields-group comprises public law (n = 204), international law (n = 104), and private law (n = 54). The Cross-Cutting-Topics-group encompasses religion (n = 226), inclusion (n = 133), and digitalization (n = 91). Bivariate group comparisons for teaching type and study components used row-wise χ2 adaptation tests (df = 1; Alpha level 0.001). Non-significant deviations in the overall code distribution suggest a thematic focus independent of teaching types. For study components, significant group disparities are evident for legal sciences (χ2 = 37.37, p < 0.001), law/legal system (χ2 = 13.64, p < 0.001), private law (χ2 = 21.19, p < 0.001), and religion (χ2 = 70.26, p < 0.001), closely associated with subject-specific studies. Inclusion (χ2 = 140.58, p < 0.001) is predominantly identified in educational science studies. Contrary to initial assumptions, law is a marginal yet focal point in university teacher education, primarily discussed in a subject-specific context. Instances feature generalized references, covering only a fraction of potential legal topics. Professional university teacher education faces the challenge of cultivating transferable legal methodological knowledge, incorporating service and administrative law, and creating opportunities for reflection to foster a professionally legal habitus. Consequently, there is no basis for claiming legal professionalization – and the potential of legal literacy in contemporary teacher education with regard to social challenges remains unrealized.

Avenarius, H. (2019a). The significance of school law for teacher education: Part 2. School Administration: Professional journal for school development and school management. Hessen, Rheinland Pfalz, 24(6), 183–185. https://doi.org/10.25656/01:17764 Avenarius, H. (2019b). The significance of school law for teacher education: Part 1. School Administration: Professional journal for school development and school management. Hessen, Rheinland Pfalz, 24(4), 108–111. https://doi.org/10.25656/01:17608 Bowen, G. A. (2009). Document analysis as a qualitative research method. Qualitative Research Journal (SJR), 9(2), 27–40. https://doi.org/10.3316/QRJ0902027 Clandinin, D. J. & Husu, J. (Eds.). (2017a). The SAGE Handbook of Research on Teacher Education (vol. 1). Russell Sage Foundation. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781526402042.n1 Clandinin, J. D. & Husu, J. (Eds.). (2017b). The SAGE handbook of resaerch on teacher education (vol. 2). Russell Sage Foundation. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781526402042 Füssel, H.-P. (2020). Law - A blind spot in teacher education. In C. Cramer, J. König, M. Rothland & S. Blömeke (Eds.), Handbook of Teacher Education (pp. 114–122). Bad Heilbrunn: Klinkhardt. https://doi.org/10.35468/hblb2020-013 Kuckartz, U., & Rädiker, S. (2023). Qualitative content analysis: Methods, practice and using software (2nd ed.). SAGE. Krippendorff, K. (2019). Content Analysis. An Introduction to its methodology (4th ed.). Russell Sage Foundation. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781071878781 Stedrak, L. & Mezzina, J. (2022). Legal Literacy for Public School Teachers. ELA.