Diversity pedagogical content knowledge: a new conceptual framework and assessment across different teacher education programmes

Previous work on multicultural teaching competence has mainly focused on teachers’ beliefs and attitudes towards ethnocultural diversity. Little attention has been paid to examine the nature of teachers’ ethnocultural diversity knowledge. Drawing upon Shulman’s model of pedagogical content knowledge, this study presents a novel theoretical framework and a performance-based assessment for examining teachers’ ethnocultural diversity knowledge. We collected data from 819 preservice teachers across six teacher education programmes in Belgium, Flanders. Our findings indicate that student teachers in Flanders have limited and low levels of cultural diversity knowledge and there is a significant variation between the mean scores of teacher education programmes. We conclude by arguing that teacher education institutions should make meaningful reforms to develop student teachers’ knowledge base regarding ethnocultural diversity.