Initial teacher training for secondary schools–a new curriculum for the age of migration?

Abstract

In this article, competencies of teachers for an age of migration where students with refugee and migration background are part of many classrooms are tied to the question why a current reform in initial teacher education failed to adjust to an urgent need. The country under scrutiny for this case-study is Austria. The focus is on the curricula of secondary teacher education. It had to be developed along the new Bologna architecture—a top-down requirement—and bottom-up filled with content by the teacher educators of the institutions involved in the reform. First, I will give a short historical and present-day sketch of migration and schooling in Austria in the light of international data and the comparative context integration theory. Secondly, I will discuss relevant topics in initial teacher education and present data from the TALIS 2018 survey. Thirdly, I will describe the reform of the initial teacher education in Austria and discuss four hypotheses why it did not manage to respond to the needs of today’s socio-culturally, linguistically and religious highly diverse schools.