Conference Agenda

In the rapidly evolving landscape of education and growing educational inequalities, the need to maintain diversity and inclusive practices has never been more important. "Teachers of Colour, Minority and Indigenous Teachers: Continuities and Futures in Educational Research" is a symposium that aims to explore the diversity of staffrooms in shaping the educational landscape, addressing challenges such as (linguistic) racism, and fostering a more just and resilient future.

Structural inequalities and the perpetuation of systems of power that maintain racial hierarchies in schools across Europe and beyond are a common starting point. Related, overarching questions focus on how institutional practices, policies and cultures within education systems contribute to the marginalisation or empowerment of minority teachers. In addition, counter-narratives that challenge dominant racial ideologies are explored by highlighting the voices of teachers who resist racial inequalities, thereby providing a broader understanding of how individuals navigate and challenge discriminatory practices.

The symposium brings together four contributions to what has now become an important and wide-ranging field of educational research (see Gist & Bristol, 2022; Gutman et al., 2023). Each contribution addresses unique aspects of diversity within the teaching profession and its impact on the educational landscape:

Paper 1 emphasises the importance of a diverse teaching workforce in actively challenging and unlearning stereotypical prejudices in South Africa. It examines how schools can become cultivated sites where diverse teachers and learners can serve as valuable opportunities and encounters for unlearning the epistemic damage of stereotypical biases and myths.

Paper 2 explores the perceptions of minority pre-service teachers on the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in Israeli teacher education. This aspect of diversity involves the intersection of technology and education, emphasizing the importance of considering the diversity of pre-service teachers when incorporating AI applications in teacher education programs.

Paper 3 focuses on the biographical narratives of minority pre-service teachers who bring multilingualism into the classroom. On the one hand, it sheds light on the ambivalences that arise when they hardly distance themselves from the monoglossic language ideologies of the German school system. On the other hand, it highlights their potential to combat linguistic racism.

Paper 4 investigates the impact of study abroad experiences on the perceptions of diversity and inclusion among in-service teachers in Japan. Findings reveal that while participants recognize alternative practices for inclusion, they struggle with effectively implementing change within the existing school culture, balancing their commitment to diversity with the pressure to conform to prevailing norms.

Together, these four papers contribute to the broader conversation about the importance of teachers of colour, minority and indigenous teachers, and teacher mobility, in shaping a more inclusive and socially just education system in Europe and beyond.

The commitment by some historically ‘white’ schools in post-apartheid South Africa to retain their historical identity and privilege is especially evident in two discernible, yet inter-related paradigms. The more prominent one concerns the slow pace of learner diversity, while the other relates to the starkly neglected matter of teacher diversity. While historically excluded ‘black’ learners are kept at bay via the emergence of a new race-class discourse, ‘black’ teachers are excluded through an ambiguous language of ‘qualified, but incompetent’. Incompetency derives from one or several intersectional identity markers, which can include anything from culture, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, class, to qualification and knowledge, ultimately casting diverse teacher identities in images of mistrust. Of interest to this paper, on the one hand, is a seemingly a priori association of competence, as well as unquestioning trust coupled with ‘white’ teachers. While on the other hand, ‘black’ teachers are treated with suspicion and mistrust, not only because of their presumed incompetence, but because of who they are and the kinds of knowledge they stand to bring. What, therefore, is the role of schools in disrupting the binary between ‘white’-competence-trust’ and ‘black’-incompetence-mistrust? And how might schools become cultivated sites where diverse teacher and learner cohorts can serve as valuable opportunities and encounters for unlearning the epistemic harm of stereotypical biases and myths?

Hunter, M. (2016). The Race for Education: Class, White Tone, and Desegregated Schooling in South Africa. Journal of Historical Sociology, 29 (3), 319–358 Ingersoll, R., May, H. & Collins, G. (2019). Recruitment, employment, retention and the minority teacher shortage. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 27(37), 1-37. Kohli, R. & Pizarro, M. (2016) Fighting to educate our own: Teachers of color, relational accountability, and the struggle for racial justice. Equity & Excellence in Education, 49(1), 72–84. Sleeter, C. E. (2001). Preparing teachers for culturally diverse schools research and the overwhelming presence of whiteness. Journal of Teacher Education, 52(2), 94–106. Teeger, C. (2015). Ruptures in the Rainbow Nation: How Desegregated South African Schools Deal with Interpersonal and Structural Racism. Sociology of Education, 88 (3), 226–243.

During these days there is growing interest in the use of artificial intelligence (AI) applications in the education world (Celik, 2023; Păvăloaia & Necula, 2023). The academic institutions for teacher training carry out procedures for the integration of these applications in the teaching and learning of students. In this framework, the pre-service teachers at the academic institution who come from different sectors: Arab, Jewish, Christian, and ultra-Orthodox were exposed to practical lectures and workshops on the integration of AI applications in education. The research used a mixed method approach using qualitative and quantitative analysis. This paradigm calls for an in-depth examination of investigated phenomena through qualitative analysis but also enables data quantification to examine general trends through quantitative analysis. Two research tools were used: (1) a reflective protocol (2) a questionnaire regarding the dimensions of pre-service teachers' use of AI tools. The analysis of the study reveals six main categories: 1) the contribution of the exposure to AI applications; 2) AI applications and their use in teaching-learning; 3) reducing gaps between the students with the use of AI applications; 5) assessing the use of AI applications; 6) skills acquired with the use of AI applications. This research provides an understanding of the pre-service teachers from a multicultural academic institution's perception regarding the uses of AI in the early stages of their teaching, and its main uniqueness. In light of this, these findings help policymakers in teacher training in academic institutions from two main perspectives: policy aspects – it offers a comprehensive, wide, and multicultural perspective regarding the various ways in which students use AI applications and their perspective, and teacher training process and the scaffolding that students from a different background and culture need for establishing their role as future teachers in AI era.

Celik, I. (2023). Towards Intelligent-TPACK: An empirical study on teachers’ professional knowledge to ethically integrate artificial intelligence (AI)-based tools into education. Computers in Human Behavior, 138, 107468. Păvăloaia, V. D., & Necula, S. C. (2023). Artificial intelligence as a disruptive technology—a systematic literature review. Electronics, 12(5), 1102.

Research on minority (pre-service) teachers in Germany dates back to the first decade after the turn of the millennium (Lengyel & Rosen, 2015, p. 162). However, there is a lack of research in this area, which contrasts with education policy that has long since developed a strategy for recruiting minority teachers. According to education policy, minority teachers posses specific competencies due to their own or their families' migration experiences, and as such are bridge-builders, integration facilitators, etc., who contribute to reducing educational inequalities in the German school system. Migration researchers in educational science in Germany are critical of this ethnicization as it promotes stigmatization and deprofessionalization (see Goltsev et al., 2023, p. 128; Rosen & Jacob, 2023). In a recent literature review on minority teachers in Germany, multilingualism was identified as one of four research foci (Rosen & Lengyel, 2023). This paper focuses on biographical perspectives towards monoglossic language ideologies (Thoma, 2022), building on an exploratory finding from this review that minority (student) teachers exhibit ambivalence towards multilingual language practices in school. This paper uses biographical narrative interviews with plurilingual student teachers (n=10) to investigate the impact of past school experiences on their professional identities in relation to multilingualism. The research question is: What is the impact of past school experiences on student teachers' views of multilingual practices in future schools? The Grounded Theory analysis (according to Charmaz, 2014) shows that the minority student teachers hold 'one-language-at-a-time monolingual ideologies' (Wei, 2018, p. 16): Because they believe that it was acceptable to be asked to act monolingually in their previous schooling and plan to continue to do so as teachers, they do not distance themselves from the monoglossic language ideologies of the German school system. This is theorised in relation to the concept of linguicism (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2015) and a raciolinguistic perspective (Rosa & Flores, 2020), and discussed in relation to findings that consider students' perspectives. Here, studies show that multilingual students who have experienced that 'my teacher had an accent too' see themselves as legitimate members of a linguistically heterogeneous community (Putjata, 2019), pointing to the potential of multilingual minority teachers to combat linguistic racism.

Lengyel, D. & Rosen, L. (2015). Diversity in the staff room – Ethnic minority student teachers’ perspectives on the recruitment of minority teachers. In Tertium Comparationis, 21(2), 161–184. Putjata, G. (2019). Language in transnational education trajectories between the Soviet Union, Israel and Germany. In Diskurs Kindheits- und Jugendforschung 4, 390–404. Rosa, J., & Flores, N. (2020). Reimagining Race and Language: From Raciolinguistic Ideologies to a Raciolinguistic Perspective. In H. Samy Alim et al. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Language and Race (pp. 90-107). Oxford University Press. Rosen, L. & Lengyel, D. (2023). Research on Minority Teachers in Germany. In M. Gutman et al. (eds.): To be a Minority Teacher in a Foreign Culture (pp. 107–123). Springer. Rosen, Lisa & Jacob, Marita (2022). Diversity in the Teachers’ Lounge in Germany – Casting Doubt on the Statistical Category of “Migration Background”. In European Educational Research Journal, 21(2), 312-329. Skutnabb‐Kangas, T. (2015). Linguicism. In Carol A. Chapelle (ed.), The encyclopedia of applied linguistics (pp. 1–6). Wiley. Thoma, N. (2022). Biographical perspectives on language ideologies in teacher education. In Language and Education, 36(5), 419-436. Wei, Li (2018). Translanguaging as a Practical Theory of Language. Applied Linguistics 39 (1), 9–30.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of the study abroad experience on teachers’ perceptions about diversity and inclusion at schools. It examines how these teachers are minoritized as outsiders who bring in unnecessary challenges to schools. As a theoretical framework, this research adopted Functional Context Theory of Learning (Sticht, 1975). The theory regards learning as information processing, in which the learners actively look for information and use it to construct a meaningful interpretation of the world. These interpretations lead to the knowledge base, with which learners further interpretate new incoming information. In this research, the study abroad program, that are intended to build a global view, is predicted to change teachers’ way of processing information. Consequently, the teachers with study abroad experiences are hypothesized to have unique perspectives on the issues and challenges that schools are facing, including the diversity and inclusion issue. In terms of methodology, in-service teachers in Japan who had participated in a four-week study abroad programme as part of their teacher education training programme between 2015 and 2020 were invited to complete a survey and follow-up interview. The survey and interviews focused on the participants' perceptions of diversity and inclusion issues in schools, as well as how they believed their views on these issues were treated among teachers. As can be seen from the results, the returning teachers who took part in the study reported that they had experienced a unique struggle. Although they can see an alternative way of practicing inclusion at schools, they do not necessarily know an effective way to make changes in the current school culture. While they care about diversity and inclusion of students and teachers, they also feel their need to fit in to the current teachers’ culture by acting as if they care more about uniformity.

Sticht, T. (1975). Reading for working: A functional literacy anthology. Alexandria: Human Resources Research Organization.