Teacher Education in Austria – Reforms between Innovations and Traditions

The analytical study has four parts. The first part outlines the essential context and briefly describes the history of the education of children and adolescents in Austria from 1774 to the present. The focus of the account is, however, a detailed description of the changes that undergraduate education of Austrian teachers has undergone from the 18th to the 21st century. The second part describes the current form of Austrian teacher training, which has its own distinctive features: the school system is the responsibility of the separate federal lands and the central government only makes framework laws; teacher training falls under two different ministries and teacher training takes three different forms. For the moment nursery-school teachers need only middle-school (high-school) training. Teachers for primary and the lower secondary degree of schools study mainly at Pedagogical Higher Schools (falling under the Ministry for Education, the Arts and Culture), while teachers for the higher secondary degree of schools study mainly at universities (falling under the Ministry for Science and Research). The third part of the study is devoted to discussion of the reform of the undergraduate training of teachers in the spirit of the Bologna Process. The current situation is that for the moment the training of teachers and of doctors in Austria takes the form of unstructured studies. The two ministries concerned set up a joint expert group, expert conferences were organised, a federal development council was established, and all this resulted in 2013 in the passing of a new university law that essentially retained the status quo but opened up the possibility for co-operation between the two basic institutions training teachers. The fourth part of the study offers thoughts on possible future developments.