European Educational Research Journal

This article investigates the professional integration of a group of newly arrived teachers, mainly from Syria, who participated in the labour market Fast-track programme in Sweden, which aims at facilitating quicker pathways to teaching positions. Drawing on the institutional perspective, our analysis focuses on formal and informal institutional conditions that hinder or enable newly arrived teachers in their striving for legitimacy as professional teachers. Analysis of focus group interviews and observations show that despite their professional experiences there are limits to their prior professional skills and competences being recognized within the Swedish school. The main institutional challenges identified were acquiring Swedish, understanding and managing the pupil-centred curriculum and its associated communication skills and taking on the facilitator teacher role. Handling and negotiating these challenges are important for gaining recognition as professional teachers, which, it seems, influences their opportunities for employment. To afford them opportunities for professional socialization, it is important to enable them to become acquainted with, handle and negotiate institutional conditions within a new school culture. In contrast to the quick-fix view of European integration policy, our study shows that the professional integration process takes time and includes a socialization process.

The diversity of teachers is half that of the student population in Australia. Despite government policies to support internationally trained teachers (ITTs), there remain major structural and institutional barriers working against access to the profession: an information gap, the lack of professional advice, the absence of programmes to help teachers gain accreditation and the lack of mentoring or support programmes. This paper focuses on ITTs undertaking volunteer teaching in community languages schools; these are community-run organisations where over 100,000 children across Australia learn their home language. These sites were selected as they represent a key pathway into further study and employment for ITTs. Findings are drawn from online survey (n=954) and interviews (n=62) exploring professional strengths, needs and experiences. The key finding is the exclusion and ‘problematisation’ of ITTs, rather than recognition of the social, educational and economic benefits represented by this group. The article explores recent government-funded provision of pathways to teacher accreditation and the extent to which these address the barriers identified. There is a discussion of how such a model may be embedded in mainstream teacher education pathways.

Despite an increase in ethnic diversity within the state, the Irish teaching workforce remains starkly mono-ethnic. This article is based on an analysis of data generated through a sequential explanatory mixed method research project involving questionnaire responses from 240 migrant teachers and subsequent focus group with a selection of teachers. Findings suggest that migrant teachers are slow to engage in the formal accreditation process, and face considerable challenges when they do. This reflects not only practical difficulties, but also narrow discourses of who can legitimately be recognised as a teacher in Ireland. This in turn is linked to cultural arbitraries highlighted through the research, such as a requirement to be able to teach through the Irish language in primary school and a requirement to be registered to teach in primary or post-primary schools only. In exploring these barriers, we draw broadly on Bourdieu and Passeron’s (1990) work, which understands teachers as pedagogic agents, imbued with pedagogic authority through formal processes of accreditation and selection. These processes involve the imposition of cultural arbitraries which legitimate certain languages, content or stances over others. Recommendations include revisions to the registration process to take previous teaching experience into account.

This paper presents a study that scrutinises if and how teachers with so-called migration background in Switzerland have pedagogical potential in dealing with migration-related diversity and – more precisely – with the recognition of their students. The notion of recognition refers to Honneth’s theoretical elaborations and their translations into the pedagogical context by Helsper and Lingkost. The study is pursued with a qualitative approach, with data collection by means of biographical-narrative interviews (Schütze), theoretical sampling (Glaser and Strauss) and a hermeneutical data analysis (Schütze, Rosenthal). The analysis reveals three ideal types that each show particular resources as well as particular restrictions in their attempts to realise recognition. The results are discussed in regard to the development potential they disclose. While the type-specific particularities each call for more professionalisation, the restrictions point to the fact that teachers with migration-related resources can only fully live their potential if they do not have to experience their belonging, acceptance and recognition as latently fragile.

This article looks deeper into the educational careers and barriers faced by internationally trained teachers with refugee backgrounds. Highly skilled teachers experience among others formal barriers due to the two-subject regime in Austria. This study analyses the barriers and measures that disable or enable the re-qualification of internationally trained teachers who wish to continue their profession in Austria. Guided by a participatory approach laid out by Von Unger in 2014, this study taps into the needs of teaching professionals with refugee backgrounds and led to the development and implementation of a course. The course was compiled to provide educational knowledge as well as pedagogical training. Even though the completed subject of internationally trained teachers was recognised (apart from courses concerning didactics), the fulfilment of regular teacher training in Austria is seen as a conditio sine qua non. Hence, teachers with a different formal-educational background, irrespective of professional expertise, are seen as lacking education and/or skills. Considering that there is no worldwide consensus regarding the content and structure of teacher education, the implication of a lack of skills as well as the need for bridging programmes will be critically discussed from the participants’ perspectives. This article offers insight into the transcultural implications of professionalism.

Teachers trained in one country are often not allowed to serve as teachers in another country because their teacher’s license is not recognised as equivalent. The barriers these teachers have to overcome in order to work in their profession again are high and often require further (full) teacher training at the university. The paper provides insights into the conditions for teachers who participate in (re-)qualification programmes in Germany and Europe. By linking the theoretical concepts of a biographical approach to teacher professionalisation and transnationalisation in education, the results of an interview study with teachers who have participated in a programme for refugee teachers at a university in Germany are presented. The Grounded Theory analysis reconstructs the strategies of internationally educated teachers managing to keep up their hope to be able to work as teachers again and thus counter the formal de-professionalisation they are facing.

Teachers with so-called migration backgrounds are often assumed to possess higher intercultural competencies or skills for more adequately dealing with migration-related diversity than other teachers. However, these assumptions of higher intercultural competencies, specific pedagogical orientations and attitudes have rarely been systematically empirically examined. On the other hand, such a utilitarian ethnicization is increasingly criticized by migration researchers in educational science in Germany as furthering stigmatization and deprofessionalization. Against this background, our paper aims to contribute to the lively discourse about teacher with so-called migration backgrounds. We start with analysing teacher data from the German National Education Panel Study (NEPS). Our analyses indicate that teachers with and without so-called migration backgrounds do not differ significantly in most respects. These findings led us to methodological considerations with regard to the (non-)usefulness of the statistical category of ‘migration background’ in educational migration research.

Turkish-origin migrants on average show lower academic performance than Germans. This achievement gap cannot be fully explained by socio-economic differences between the groups. Negative competence stereotypes about Turkish-origin students predict the causal attributions that German preservice teachers make for migrants’ academic underperformance. Specifically, the more strongly preservice teachers endorse negative competence stereotypes, the more likely they are to attribute academic underperformance of Turkish-origin migrants to the migrants themselves and less to the educational system. Stereotype threat theory posits that the activation of stereotypes in test situations can reduce the performance of members of the negatively stereotyped group. Based on this theory, we propose that negative stereotypes provide a social-psychological explanation for the academic underperformance of Turkish-origin migrants compared to Germans. A series of six experiments conducted within a research project funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research investigated stereotype threat effects for Turkish-origin migrants. Two new moderator variables were identified: implicit theory of intelligence and vertical collectivism. A meta-analysis of the six studies showed a small, non-significant mean effect for stereotype threat main effects, but a significant medium-sized mean effect for moderated stereotype threat effects. Limitations and practical implications of stereotype threat effects in educational settings are discussed.

This article analyses the ways in which notions of student diversity and student voice are defined in five European countries, two terms directly related to notions of inclusion. In so doing, it examines links between the two terms, noting that, often, they are used in international research without acknowledging the ways that they are defined within particular national contexts. Using literature and policy documents from five countries (i.e. Austria, Denmark, England, Portugal and Spain), the article highlights similarities as well as differences in the various contexts. Through the analysis of these texts, the paper concludes that diversity is conceptualised in five ways, although there is occasionally overlap of different conceptualisations in some of the countries. Meanwhile, the term ‘student voice’ is a term that is not used in some of the countries’ policies. Instead, other terms that relate to student voice, such as ‘participation’, are used. The paper discusses the implications of these varied understandings for the promotion of the inclusion of all students in schools.

Accounts focusing on the relation between conceptualisations of parenthood and neuroDiscourse are missing within educational philosophy. This lacuna forms the background of this paper, which reports on a case study on the level of social policy documents addressing parents of the Flemish governmental branch office Kind & Gezin (Child & Family). The case’s focus is a critical analysis of discursive constructions of parenthood, and the extent to which results of neuroscience, as they appear in the documents, exert a change in these discursive constructions of good parenthood. The study deploys critical metaphor analysis to explore the conceptualisations of parenthood that are metaphorically constructed, what these constructions convey about good parenthood, and how they relate to neuroDiscourse. The analysis, firstly, points at neuroDiscourse of parenthood being operational in the documents, but operating in a different manner than that described in the literature. Nevertheless, neuroDiscourse of parenthood exerts a narrowing effect on the way parenthood is conceptualised in parenthood Discourse. Secondly, the analysis exposes the assumption that parenthood advice is best grounded in scientific evidence, facilitating the further occurrence of parenting advice based on neuroscience. Thirdly, in relating Kind & Gezin’s mission of optimal preventive family support to neuroDiscourse of parenthood, the possibility of neuro-governance of parents arises.