The aim of the contribution is to explore the holistic approach to multilingualism in teacher education from a critical theoretical and an empirical perspective. In the theoretical discussion biographical approaches to teacher development are connected with concepts relating to "(linguistic) diversity in education". The question is how to educate teachers, for which context (what does (linguistic) diversity mean?) and for what purpose (what is the aim of educating teachers for diversity?). The investigation will comprise three main topics a. language education policy in the context of human rights and democracy (and particularly the plurilingual approach of the Council of Europe, e.g. CEFR-Companion Volume2020, CM/Rec(2022)), b. epistemic and powerful knowledge and epistemic multilingualism (Hudson 2021) and c. an understanding of multilingualism that is inspired by concepts from the so-called Global South, such as multilinguality (Agnihotri 2014), the horizontal and vertical dimensions of multilingualism (Heugh 2015), translingualism(s) and transknowledging. Within this theoretical frame challenges and perspectives of multilingual education and the role of teacher education are identified.
The empirical part is about a longitudinal action-research on a service-learning course in university teacher education that developed after 2015. At that time, many young people had to leave their countries and schools because of war and extreme insecurity and continued their education in new countries and different educational systems. Multilingualism was already a normality in education before the 2015 „Crisis of Humanity". Hence, the need for educating teachers for linguistic diversity was not new, it only became even more pressing since then. In October 2015 a course was designed for pre-service teachers of all subjects at the University of Vienna with the aim to prepare teaching for diversity. The course design is based on three interwoven strands, i.e. 1. presenting and discussing content (knowledge about multilingualism), 2. collaborating with the UniClub, a university project that supports pupils from refugee migration in their work at school and 3. developing teaching material that puts the principles of multilingual teaching into practice (Vetter 2021, Vetter et al. 2018). The course is continually adapted to the needs of the collaborating institution: Whereas at the beginning of this cooperation it was of an utmost importance to address pupils in the refugee centres and help them in their first steps into German, the main concern of the following years was to adequately support the pupils who were now integrated into the schools in their everyday work at school.
In this contribution the following data collected since 2015 will be analysed: the students' personal reflection on the cooperation and the teaching materials produced in the course. These data are discussed in the background of challenges and aims resulting from the theoretical investigation concepts.
