Future Teachers' Representations of Cultural Diversity Before and After an Intercultural Education Course

Recently, Europe experienced an increase in social complexity, leading to the emergence of culturally diverse schools. To encourage inclusion, well-being, and widespread school performance and achievement, formal education must improve its sensitivity and competency toward cultural diversity (Agostinetto et al. 2021). Teachers play a crucial role in this process, as their beliefs shape their understanding, problem-solving approach, and subsequent actions (Civitillo et al. 2019). In Italy, Intercultural Education is considered as the pedagogical project inbuilt to the multicultural environment and directed towards four basic proposals: human rights, social justice, decentralization and dialogue and mediation. Future teachers are prepared for working in multicultural environments by challenging biases, exploring their beliefs and binary visions directing them toward diversity understood as dynamic, complex phenomenon. This work focuses on a pilot study, where we investigate future teachers’ beliefs pre and post lectures in an innovative way. At the beginning and end of the course, the students are asked to represent their ideas about diversity in a multimodal (image/text) way. We analyze the disparities in representational models, examining their meanings and the extent of differences in pre and post course representations. Inspired by Kuttner et al. (2020), our work uses multimodality to uncover unexpected insights and reveal information that otherwise would have remained hidden. Following authors’ notion that sketching, drawing, redrawing, and inking involve processes of refinement and decision-making, our objective is to identify the changes in representation choices that occurred after the completion of the course (p.199). The data collection has been completed, and preliminary findings are presented in this work. The paper offers recommendations for employing multimodal methodologies in initial teacher education to better comprehend the beliefs of future teachers regarding cultural diversity. Additionally, it provides guidance for academics involved in designing courses on effectively representing diversity to promote optimal understanding.