In contemporary societies, globalization, individualization, and pluralization of values and cultural norms are obvious. Against this background, the current educational discourse states “diversity” as a crucial concept and claims an appropriate consideration of differences regarding culture, gender, or aptitudes. Thereby, recognition and appreciation of diversity constitute overarching aims of education and are seen as basic requirements for democracy and equality in modern societies (Prengel, 1993). As central actors in education, teachers play a key role in implementing these overarching aims. Research on teacher competences suggests that the teachers’ personal dispositions are crucial for performing specific functions and tasks in teaching, e.g. for dealing effectively with diverse students (e.g. Klieme & Hartig, 2008). Such dispositions correspond to deeply held beliefs, values and norms.

However, the knowledge about these deeply held beliefs of teachers are barely investigated in relation to intercultural education. The available findings show generally a deficit view in the sense that minority children are perceived mainly as having problems and facing specific challenges, but not with their resources (e.g. Pantić, Closs & Ivošević, 2010; Silverman, 2010). Other findings deal with the lack of coherence between policy discourse and the discourse of educational practitioners (e.g. Bereményi, 2011; Mizrachi, 2012), compose typologies of different forms of dealing with intercultural situations (e.g. Edelmann, 2007; Stier et al., 2012) or try to link different ways of reflecting on intercultural education to aspects of personality like gender and ethnical background (e.g. Ford & Quinn, 2010).

However, hardly any evidence addresses the question what shapes teachers’ beliefs about intercultural education – which can be seen as one of the crucial questions from the perspective of teacher education: If teacher education aims at preparing and supporting teachers for dealing effectively with culturally diverse settings, it has to understand how teachers conceptualize key facets of intercultural education and how these conceptualizations might be influenced. Against this background, the presented research suggests a conceptual approach to understand teachers’ beliefs about intercultural education. In doing so, it draws on constructivist approaches suggesting that teachers perceive cultural heterogeneity with different levels of complexity, according to their intercultural sensitivity (Berger & Luckmann, 1966; specifically for the intercultural context: Bennett, 2004): Teachers’ ability to perceive cultural differences and similarities influences their thinking, feeling and behaviour toward students with different cultural backgrounds. Therefore, the presented research shows how the perception regarding intercultural education differs according to different levels of intercultural sensitivity. With this approach, a translation of the generic ‘Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity’ (DMIS) (Bennett, 2004) to the specific context of schooling and teaching is proposed: How are different levels of intercultural sensitivity reflected in perceiving specific situations in school? What are prototypical operationalizations of different levels of intercultural sensitivity in teaching? By answering these questions on an empirical basis, the proposed research provides the fundamentals for moving ‘intercultural education’ from normatively imbued top-down training to a need-based support of teachers.

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