In Germany, Switzerland and Austria – as in other European countries – the school performance of pupils from immigrant families is significantly lower than the one of their native peers (OECD 2006, p. 2). Reducing this achievement gap by reforming pre-service teacher education is a challenge that is being addressed by these three German-speaking countries. In the last few years, innovations focused on the guiding idea that, with increasing diversity in schools, teachers in multicultural societies need to be prepared for teaching in culturally and linguistically heterogeneous schools. The diversity of teachers and/or pre-service teachers themselves, however, was not or only rarely taken into account by educational policy. Today, this diversity is being discussed as one strategy for reducing educational disadvantages of pupils from immigrant families and for enhancing the school system’s intercultural receptiveness.

According to the international state of research, the expectations placed on the recruitment of migrant teachers seem to be justified (Strasser & Steber 2010, p. 117). In English-speaking OECD-countries, research on this specific object of recruitment has been carried out since the 1980s. In Austria, Germany and Switzerland it is still at its initial stage, but it reconfirms some of the international findings and assumes hidden potentials in migrant teachers as well (Edelmann 2013; Georgi, Ackermann & Karakaş 2011; Knappik & Dirim 2012). These first research steps concern heterogeneity and its effects on the teachers’ side. On the side of pre-service teachers from immigrant families at university hardly any intercultural research has been conducted so far (Lengyel & Rosen 2012).

Therefore it is the aim of this symposium to give an outline of the emerging development in research in this field and to present first results. First of all, an important research task is to describe empirically the group of migrant students including their socio-demographic characteristics. It also needs to be clarified what these students think about their specific resources (input by Edelmann, Switzerland). Another open question is how the proportionally low number of teacher training students from immigrant families can be explained. Individual decision processes by the students themselves and the lower educational success of pupils from immigrant families which leads to missing university entrance qualifications are not the only reasons. The focus of research is here on the teacher education system itself. What are the barriers and mechanisms of exclusion at university and which role does the monolingual habitus within educational institutions play (input by Döll & Knappik, Austria)? Lastly, the content of courses offered by pre-service teacher education needs to be taken into account. How can the hidden potential of migrant students, i. e. their biographical resources, be developed into professional competencies during teacher education (input by Lengyel & Rosen, Germany)?

In sum, the proposed symposium illuminates the relation between diversity and pre-service teacher education from three different perspectives: it focuses on the migrant students themselves, on practices of exclusion in teacher education, and on a concept for teacher education that spotlights the process of professionalizing biographical resources.