Addressing Students’ Need in Mixed Ability Intercultural Classrooms: An Examination of Teachers’ Perspectives and Practices of Interculturally Differentiated Teaching

The challenge teachers and schools face nowadays is twofold: adopting an intercultural education framework and introducing high-quality teaching that will provide an equal opportunity for learning to all students, regardless of their ethnic origin or other characteristics. In this context, after we introduce the framework of Interculturally Differentiated Teaching (IDT), we examine the implementation of IDT in real classroom settings that are characterised by both mixed ability and cultural diversity. Drawing upon interview and observation data, we examine how teachers attempt to deal with this twofold challenge by focusing on their practices, the barriers they face, and their suggestions. Our findings caution that teachers are rather ill-prepared to deploy differentiated instruction in order to address both the goals of cultivating intercultural competence and maximising the learning potential for all their students. Our research bears wider implications, suggesting that for IDT to be successfully implemented in practice, education policy should promote comprehensive approaches of intercultural education and differentiated instruction, both in terms of teaching and teacher training.