The school environment of the 21st century is shaped by rapidly changing social and societal conditions that teachers need to adapt to, increasing linguistic, cultural and ethnical diversity among other things. The development of attitudes and strategies to cope with these constant societal transformations lies at the core of pedagogical work today, especially in Luxemburg, where almost half of the population are foreigners and 59% of the students have a different first language than Luxembourgish. Regarding these changes, the following questions arise: How do schoolteachers in this highly complex context construct their professional self? Which ideologies of language, culture, identity and heterogeneity do they rely on? How do they construct difference and homogeneity? Which values become visible within their argumentation? The present research project focuses on the narratives of two Luxemburgish primary school teachers representing similar cases. In the analysis of the interviews, we concentrate on the following question: How do these teachers construct differences among students? In other words, what kind of categories they use to construct heterogeneity and homogeneity within their school population, such as sociocultural backgrounds, languages, cognitive capacities or homogenous standards and norms? The constructed realities not only show on what grounds the teachers’ beliefs and attitudes are based on, but reveal furthermore the limits of the educational discourse, i.e. what can and what can’t be said, what is tolerated and what is not. With this study, we will contribute
to a deeper understanding about underlying ideologies and ways of self-positioning of teachers in a highly diverse society with multilingual and multicultural traditions.