Conference Agenda

This study examines how school social justice policies and practices (SJPP) relate to teachers’ self-efficacy in multicultural classrooms (SEMC) and whether this relationship operates through collective diversity beliefs (CDB).

In essence, classrooms have never been culturally homogeneous spaces. Based on Bourdieu’s (1986) theory of capital, each student enters school carrying different forms of cultural capital shaped by family background, community contexts, and unequal social conditions. Therefore, interactions between teachers and students in the classroom reflect encounters among different “habitus”, which are durable systems of dispositions shaping how individuals learn, communicate, and make sense of the world. From this perspective, diversity is an inherent characteristic of teaching and learning across educational systems. In contemporary societies, this structural diversity of classrooms has been intensified by the global mobility and demographic change, raising policy and professional expectations for equitable and inclusive teaching.

Within this context, SEMC emerges as a critical dimension of teachers’ professional capacity. Grounded in Bandura’s (1997) social cognitive theory, self-efficacy is conceptualized as the product of dynamic reciprocal interactions among personal characteristics, behaviors, and environmental influences. Accordingly, teachers’ SEMC develops not only through individual experience, but also through sustained engagement with school environments.

In response to diversity and equity concerns, many education systems have introduced SJPP to establish normative expectations, legitimize inclusive practices, and structure professional experiences, which together may constitute key environmental conditions for the development of teachers’ SEMC. However, institutional theory highlights that formal policies frequently remain weakly connected to daily professional practices, a phenomenon commonly described as policy-practice decoupling (Scott, 2014). Schools, therefore, should be understood as interactive social systems in which leaders shape shared meanings, coordinate teacher interaction, and reinforce professional norms (Hoy & Miskel, 2013). Thus, SJPP function not only as policy texts but as leadership instruments through which equity priorities are communicated and normalized in school life.

From this perspective, we argue that SJPP influence teachers’ SEMC primarily through a collective mechanism: CDB, defined as the school’s shared convictions regarding how teachers collectively understand and respond to student differences. Following the logic of Goddard and Goddard (2001), the successful internalization of SJPP into teachers’ collective consciousness establishes group norms that legitimize inclusive practices. These norms provide the social validation and motivational force necessary to promote individual SEMC. Thus, CDB can serve as a critical link that translates SJPP into teachers’ SEMC and lived professional realities.

While this theoretical integration highlights the importance of CDB in linking school-level SJPP to teachers’ SEMC, empirical evidence examining this mechanism remains limited (Jang et al., 2026; Peterson & Jensen, 2025; Schwarzenthal et al., 2023). Using pooled data from the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) 2024 (OECD, 2025), this study addresses the following research questions:

(1) What are the relationships between school SJPP, teachers’ CDB, and teachers’ SEMC?

(2) Whether and to what extent does the teachers’ CDB mediate the association between school SJPP and teachers’ SEMC?

By testing a cross-national mechanism linking policy-practice environments to teacher efficacy through collective belief climate, the study contributes to international discussions on how schools can move beyond symbolic compliance toward meaningful equity in practice—informing both school leadership and policy design.

Hungary is home to 13 legally recognized national minorities, which are considered constituent elements of the state and whose collective and individual rights are guaranteed by cardinal laws. According to the 2022 census, 5.1% of the population (approximately 492,000 people) identified with a national minority based on mother tongue affiliation or language use in family or friendship contexts (KSH, 2023; parliament.hu). However, most minorities in Hungary are highly assimilated: intergenerational language transmission has often weakened or ceased, and the maintenance of minority identity has increasingly become the responsibility of public education institutions (Bindorffer, 2007). In this context, the role of minority teachers extends beyond instruction to include identity maintenance and community-building functions.

This pilot study focuses on the professional identity of teachers belonging to the Greek minority in Hungary. The Greek community is one of the smallest minorities in the country, with an institutional educational network limited to only two schools, which makes the role of teachers particularly crucial in sustaining the Greek language, cultural traditions, and community ties. Since the introduction of the Bologna system in 2006, there has been no dedicated Greek minority teacher education program in Hungary. As a result, teacher identity in this context is shaped at the intersection of multiple domains—family, school, community, and transnational experiences—where movement and mediation between contexts play a significant role in identity formation. This specific situation calls for an in-depth qualitative exploration of teacher identity.

The study is grounded in Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model, specifically its PPCT (Person–Process–Context–Time) framework (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006), which conceptualizes professional identity not as a static attribute but as the outcome of temporally unfolding, recurring proximal processes. These processes are realized through sustained, emotionally meaningful interactions between individuals and their environments and play a central role in the stabilization and reorganization of identity (Akkerman & Meijer, 2011).

The research applies Digital Storytelling (DST) (Lambert, 2002/2013) not only as a narrative data collection technique but as a complex learning and reflective practice (Pados & al., 2025, Lanszki & Kunos N., 2021). Life history exploration in qualitative research is often conducted through narrative interviews, in which an external researcher collects life history data and subsequently analyzes them (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000); beyond this approach, digital storytelling (DST) enables participants to process their life-course and learning experiences through multimodal narratives, supporting narrative sense-making and identity stabilization (Lanszki, 2022).

In the digital stories examined, three clearly distinguishable groups of teachers emerge based on their socio-historical background: (1) descendants of civil-war refugees, (2) those who came to Hungary as a result of migration to seek employment, and (3) philhellenes of Hungarian origin. These groups are not merely demographic categories; rather, they indicate different forms of ecological embeddedness (social networks, institutional access, linguistic and cultural capital, and patterns of legitimation), which, within the interpretive logic of the PPCT model, can be understood as distinct sets of conditions shaping proximal processes. The life-course narratives further pointed to two dominant identity configurations: one characterized by early pedagogical orientation and another by a later consolidation of teacher identity, both strongly shaped by familial, institutional, social and temporal factors.

The analysis revealed three mutually reinforcing patterns of proximal processes: (1) the role of relational legitimation and feedback in the emergence and stabilization of the teacher role; (2) cyclical processes of learning and reflection as mechanisms of identity maintenance; and (3) the mediation of language and culture as a lived lifeworld that provides moral and community-based legitimation for the teaching role. These patterns align with ecological and learning-centered interpretations of teacher identity (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006).

Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT) is widely framed as an equity-oriented pedagogy that treats learners’ cultural backgrounds as instructional assets and builds meaningful connections between home/community knowledge and classroom learning. However, much CRT scholarship remains rooted in Western and urban multicultural contexts, where “culture” is often operationalised through ethnicity, migration, or linguistic diversity. Less is known about how CRT is enacted in rural, resource-constrained, and non-Western settings—where “culture” may be predominantly local (community traditions, rural livelihoods, local languages/dialects, and place-based identities) and where teachers must simultaneously meet national curricular standards and respond to local cultural expectations.

Rural China is a particularly instructive setting. Teachers commonly face a dual mandate: implementing a centralised national curriculum while sustaining local culture and community identity amid geographic isolation, uneven infrastructure, limited professional support, and staff turnover. In such conditions, CRT can appear as both necessary (to maintain belonging and relevance) and difficult (due to limited resources and heavy workloads). Existing research in China and elsewhere often examines CRT through variable-centred approaches (e.g., teacher beliefs, self-efficacy, or professional development), implying a linear logic: “more X leads to more CRT.” Yet rural schooling frequently involves causal complexity: the same outcome may be achieved through different combinations of conditions, and a condition that matters in one school may be substitutable in another.

This study therefore adopts a configurational perspective to address three questions:

1. Which combinations of school-level and teacher-level conditions are sufficient for high-quality CRT in rural settings?

2. Do multiple pathways (equifinality) exist for achieving CRT under different degrees of material constraint?

3. Which conditions recur across successful configurations as core versus peripheral features of CRT enactment?

Theoretically, we integrate CRT with an ecological view of teaching and a causal-complexity lens. We conceptualise CRT not as a single practice but as a coherent bundle of enactments: cultural caring and respect, culturally meaningful communication with students and families, and systematic integration of local cultural knowledge into curricular content and pedagogy. We further theorise CRT as the product of interactions among (a) system conditions (leadership and home–school–community relations), (b) resources (infrastructure and cultural curriculum supports), and (c) teacher agency (culturally responsive competence and initiative). Rather than claiming universal generalisation, we treat rural China as a “hard case” that can enrich international debates on how CRT travels across contexts, how it changes meaning when culture is place-based rather than migration-based, and how equity-oriented pedagogy can be realised when structural supports are uneven.

The increasing focus on interculturality is paramount and recognized as essential for teacher education (UNESCO, 2006; Byram, 2012; Dervin, 2016). Due to the intrinsic link between language and culture, this becomes particularly relevant for English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers. Researching interculturality, however, can be challenging due to the nuances of this concept and how it is characterised (Kecskes, 2012). An overview of theoretical positions reveals that competence-based models explain intercultural competence as comprised of four main dimensions: awareness about what being ‘intercultural’ means, knowledge about one’s own and other cultural practices, skills relating to interpreting and adopting different cultural behaviors and attitudes towards discovering and acting under this understanding (Spitzberg & Changnon, 2009). Other approximations, however, call for comprehensive explorations of interculturality, arguing that culture represents a field in which power dynamics are at play (Dervin, 2016). Walsh (2009) calls for a contextualized lens through critical interculturality, proposed as an emancipatory means to the effects of colonisation, particularly in Latin America, which also extrapolates to similar EFL contexts. These different approximations to the study of interculturality reflect its complexity but also call for understanding how interculturality is conceptualised and exercised by individuals in light of these many theoretical positions. To achieve this, this review adopts an inductive approach applying the “Funds of Knowledge” (FoK) framework (González et al., 2005). FoK refers to the historical bodies of knowledge that individuals accumulate throughout their lives and thus allows the review to systematize the different factors that influence the development of intercultural knowledge in pre-service teachers. This systematic literature review explores empirical evidence on how EFL pre-service teachers develop their intercultural knowledge, as an effort to systematise the scarce evidence provided in this matter. The guiding question for this systematic literature review is the following: What factors has the literature reported that influence the intercultural development of English as Foreign Language pre-service English teachers?