Teachers encounter an increase in ethnic-cultural diversity in their classrooms. To create optimal learning opportunities, it is important that the background knowledge and (home) experiences of children are capitalized on in school. However, for children with migration backgrounds this seems to happen less well. A solution to this inequality is stimulating intercultural competence of teachers. A prerequisite of intercultural competence is awareness of one’s own perspective and of how this influences understanding of social (classroom) situations.

In Project ViTaS, Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) will be used to increase awareness of perspective. VTS originates from art education, but is recently being implemented in other contexts. In project ViTaS, second year students of the Academic Primary School Teacher Track (AOLB) will take part in two workshops in which they discuss a piece of art and a reading session in Kindergarten. The discussions, as well as questionnaire data, will be analyzed in order to add to the understanding of intercultural competence of pre-service teachers and of ways in which this can be influenced.

For a free download of the final report and a practical teacher tool, visit the Dutch version of this webpage

Last modified:

25 June 2022 12.35 p.m.