In 1997, Goodwin published a study examining data gathered from pre-service teachers capturing vignettes that they felt illustrated multicultural issues in schools. Her research participants recounted an incident they had witnessed or experienced and then also provided their analysis of the situation and insight into potential solutions. Her study documented the multicultural stories that pre-service teachers were witnessing in schools and also offered insights into topics and explorations for improved teacher preparation curriculum and pedagogy, attending to issues of equity and justice. Further, her analysis demonstrated the variety and complexity of issues that teacher candidates identified as well as the reality that many of the reported incidents put teachers and children in dysfunctional or oppositional relationships, thus limiting the possibilities of equitable solutions for the multicultural issues identified. Additionally, her study illustrated how teaching and learning are complicated by cultural and racial issues.

According to google scholar, over the almost 30 years since the study was published, it has been cited 169 times, demonstrating a robust impact and suggesting the study has been valued by the field. Over the past 30 years, much has also changed in the world, including increased interconnectedness through advancing communication technologies (Alsaleh, 2024) and many shared global concerns, like climate crises (World Meteorological Organization, 2025) and large-scale migration (International Organization for Migration, 2024). Today we are also seeing major shifts in geo-political and economic relationships globally (Fasslabend, 2025).

Amongst all of this shift and uncertainty, social justice in education scholars are working to build a more just and equitable future across many national boundaries, including across several European countries. And to that end, a team of 20 scholars researching in 8 different nations (Norway, Finland, Germany, France, Iran, Singapore, Canada, and USA) are working to replicate Goodwin’s (1997) study and capture the multicultural/multilingual stories of pre- and in-service teachers as well as paraprofessionals (n = ~330). This un-funded, voluntary collaboration is the ReMaP project: Reflecting on Multiculturalism/-lingualism in Practice: Professional Reflections from Educators. For this study we are asking:

• What kinds of multicultural/multilingual/diversity issues are educators (pre- and in-service teachers, paraprofessionals) concerned with?

• What kinds of questions do these issues raise for educators?

• What solutions do educators recommend in terms of dealing with multicultural/multilingual/diversity dilemmas? How appropriate and effective might these solutions be?

By asking a revised version of the questions Goodwin posed in 1997 across varied linguistic, cultural, and political contexts both inside and outside of Europe, we seek to understand the commonalities in multilingual/multicultural issues across varying contexts, as well as the differences and affordances for working together across national boundaries towards a more just future.

This study is grounded in a recently published conceptual framework (developed by European and US scholars) regarding orientations for diversity to be positive and productive (Viesca et al., 2024). This framework asserts the value of orienting classroom relationships and interactions towards interconnectedness, openness, individual and collective agency, curiosity, and creativity. This study will use these orientations as a lens to understand the multilingual/multicultural stories that are shared, both for their affordances and constraints, as well as presence and absence of the orientations noted above. The goal through this analysis is to provide useful directions for our current and future work in social justice and intercultural education. By replicating and expanding a 30-year-old study, we will empirically engage with past insights to build meaningful perspectives for our future as we work to challenge inequities. 

This study offers novel findings regarding educator perspectives around multilingual/multicultural issues in schools. It also is a unique methodological approach where researchers are tapping into local resources and efforts to contribute to a shared international dataset. Due to limited resources and various global challenges, this model of data collection and analysis, what we are terming Multinational Collaborative Multi-Site Research, offers great potential for our study and future research. Several authors of this study have already participated in this kind of research together (e.g., Alisaari et al., 2025; Viesca et al., 2022), where we tapped into local resources and innovatively co-constructed impactful international research projects. Similarly, with this study, building from years of collaborative conversations and research, this team grew by co-constructing a plan to replicate Goodwin’s (1997) study. Collaborators agreed to collect the data according to our shared protocol in their local work with pre- and in-service teachers and/or paraprofessionals, ensuring that all local ethics protocols regarding human subjects’ research are followed. We also all agreed to deidentify the data we collect and translate it into English, where necessary, for collaborative multinational analysis. Data collection began in early 2026 and will be completed by May 2026. Analysis will begin in May, through a co-constructed thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2021), approach where we will use the Viesca et al. (2024) orientations for diversity as a priori codes to make sense of the stories presented. As is common with qualitative analyses, we plan to “play” with the data (Yin, 2014) to see what emerges when we look at the stories according to the groups who created them by role (e.g., pre-service teachers, in-service teachers, and paraprofessionals), geography (by country or region), and/or by self-identified identities and experiences (language proficiencies, minoritized identities, experiences working with multilingual/multicultural children and youth, etc.). We will also look at the stories by themes present, solutions provided, and questions asked. By answering our research questions with this data collection and analysis approach, we are seeking to offer important empirical insights into the work of challenging inequities as social justice and intercultural educators across European contexts and beyond. Further, we plan to share vignettes gathered as useful curricular tools in teaching and learning efforts with educators working in various contexts striving to be more socially just.

As a study in progress, we do not yet know what the exact outcomes will be. And, from previous Multinational Collaborative Multi-Site Research projects, we expect to be surprised at how many similarities we will find across the stories we collect. As much as the varying political, social, economic, and historical contexts matter for how we understand and engage with teaching and learning, many shared issues seem to surface when we do work to challenge inequity. Specifically, we expect to find at more capacious levels of analysis consistent issues with power hierarchies, legacies of colonization and imperialism, issues of othering and belonging, and barriers to individual and collective agency. We also expect to be able to use our expansive dataset to understand the nuances of these issues as they relate to different groups, geographical locations, and personal identities. Since we are using a hopeful conceptual framework for our analysis, orientations that can overcome issues of inequity and situate diversity as positive and productive, we also plan to offer important insights into how to build the more equitable world we are striving to live in through our curriculum and pedagogical work today. Finally, we expect to have rich data that can turn into useful, timely, and relevant vignettes for ongoing support of social justice and intercultural education efforts.

Alisaari, J., O’Neill, K., Kuusela, K., Seger, A., Kimanen, A., Hammer, S., Viesca, K.M., & Khalili, S. (2025). Perceptions of belonging and school climate in diverse Finnish secondary schools. Finnish Journal of Social Research, 18(1), 41-57, https://doi.org /10.51815/fjsr.144754 Alsaleh, A. (2024). The impact of technological advancement on culture and society. Scientific Reports, 14, doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-83995-z Braun, V. & Clarke, V. (2021). Thematic analysis: A practical guide. Sage. Fasslabend, W. (2025). Geopolitical shifts in the 21st century. Austria Institut für Europa und Sicherheitspolitik. https://www.aies.at/download/2025/AIES_Comment-2025-3.pdf Goodwin, A. L. (1997). Multicultural stories: Preservice teachers’conceptions of and responses to issues of diversity. Urban Education, 32(1), 117-145. International Organization for Migration. (2024). World migration report 2024. https://publications.iom.int/books/world-migration-report-2024 Viesca, K. M., Teemant, A., Alisaari, J., Ennser-Kananen, J., Flynn, N., Hammer, S.Perumal, R., & Routarinne, S. (2022). Quality content teaching for multilingual students: An international examination of instructional practices in four nations. Teaching and Teacher Education, 113, 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2022.103649 Viesca, K. M., Alisaari, J., Flynn, N., Hammer, S., Lemmrich, S., Routarinne, S., & Teemant, A. (2024). Orientations for co-constructing a positive climate for diversity in teaching and learning. Invited manuscript published in Teacher Education in (Post-) Pandemic Times: International Perspectives on Intercultural Learning, Diversity and Equity. Peter Lang. World Meteorological Organization. (2025). State of the climate update for COP30. https://library.wmo.int/idurl/4/69674 Yin, R. K. (2014). Case study research design and methods (5th ed.). Sage.