Teacher capabilities in conditions of superdiversity
Research project
Helping educators and policymakers create inclusive schools to deliver equitable education to all.
Delving into school diversity
By partnering with schools in Victoria, we’re exploring the different practices used by educators to adequately address the needs of increasingly diverse classrooms.
Schools – like our communities – are becoming increasingly diverse. Understanding how ready teachers are to respond to this changing environment can help schools provide equitable education for all.
Our project investigates the capabilities and practices teachers find valuable for engaging with superdiversity in the classroom – as well as the factors hindering success.
Research findings will inform initial teacher education and recommendations to policymakers about ongoing professional learning.
The project will also identify a set of teacher capabilities that:
- Is valued by the profession
- Is required to deliver responsive and inclusive education in diverse classrooms
- Will improve student participation, wellbeing and educational success
What is superdiversity?
Changes to the diversity of urban and rural populations are occurring rapidly – and in intense and complex ways.
The notion of superdiversity refers to the increased public awareness and recognition of this unprecedented level of social complexity. Mass movements of people from different cultural, ethnic, linguistic, socioeconomic and religious backgrounds drive superdiversity.
Superdiversity challenges the conventional wisdom that only urban classrooms are diverse. Instead, it recognises that all schools are increasingly affected in certain ways by the intersection of multiple social and economic factors.
Our rationale and approach
Despite the significant progress made in recent decades to set up a generally supportive education policy environment, schools may still struggle to address the needs of diverse students. We know that education providers have been working hard to build up teacher capabilities, but it is still unclear how teachers can respond to students’ differences effectively.
To address this limited understanding, this project takes an innovative multimethod approach. It uses surveys and case studies to:
- Evaluate how teachers translate professional education into their practice
- Identify the capability sets that educators value and aspire to master in superdiverse classrooms
- Measure teachers' capabilities, taking into account the personal, sociopolitical and institutional factors that may impact their ability to put knowledge into practice
The results will support us in achieving three project goals.
Project goals
Project timelines
Our project consists of four phases.
Phase 1: Develop a metric of teacher capabilities
Phase one will take place in the first year of the project. It will involve:
- Interviewing representatives from key stakeholder groups to inform the design of a pilot teacher capability survey
- Piloting the teacher capability survey among primary and secondary teachers
Phase 2: Conduct the online survey - and complete case studies in 10 schools
Phase two will take place in the second year of the project. It will involve:
- Distributing the teacher capability survey to educators across Victoria
- Inviting 10 Victorian schools to participate in case studies
To understand how teachers respond to classroom diversity, the case study analyses will involve:
- Focus group conversations with teachers
- Interviews with principals
Phases 3 and 4: Perform second and third rounds of online data collection and case studies
The final two phases will take place in the third and fourth years of the project, respectively. Only educators and schools that participated in Phase 2 will take part.
School case studies in Phases 3 and 4 will focus on changes at the individual and school levels. They will explore what impact change has had on the ability of teachers to convert their capabilities into their practice.
Project team
A true collaboration, our team includes researchers from across Monash University’s Faculty of Education.