Pre-service teacher education in Germany pertaining to refugee education: an analysis of discourses in place

Recent waves of refugees into Germany have focused attention on the educational needs of refugee children in the German school system regarding language learning, students with limited or interrupted formal education (SLIFE) and trauma-informed pedagogy. As instructors in pre-service teacher education programs consider the content of their courses, they too need to be responsive to the increasing diversity and unique needs in the classrooms, since they are preparing pre-service teachers to teach in those classrooms. This is challenging as many of these university instructors are research associates [ wissenschaftliche MitarbeiterInnen ], contract employees whose precarious employment limits means they are only responsible for the content of their individual courses. To investigate what understandings these instructors draw upon when teaching pre-service teachers, interviews ( n = 8) in a pre-service teacher education program were conducted. The analysis was informed by Scollon and Scollon’s (2004) conceptualization of discourses in place and an adapted discourse mapping method from Neander Christensson (2024). Findings revealed that instructors emphasized the need for pre-service teachers to understand refugee children as multilingual learners with an urgency to learn German. Little emphasis was placed on other aspects of refugee education (i.e., SLIFE or trauma-informed pedagogy), in part from a discourse in place of separation of responsibilities between teachers and school psychologists. These findings shed light on tensions within this particular German teacher education program that reflect discourses in place at the scale of teacher education or the educational system and hinder the inclusion of evidence-based practices for teaching refugee children.