Abstract
The chapter reports on the preliminary results of a longitudinal study into teachers’ beliefs about and practices of inclusive plurilingual education, i.e. education that leverages all the linguistic resources students bring to the classroom. The study complements a two-year professional development course with teams of primary school teachers working in South Tyrol, northern Italy. Drawing on interview data collected during the first year of the project, this chapter focuses in particular on 12 teachers working at a school where German is the main language of instruction. Findings highlight the importance of promoting teacher reflexivity and shed light on the difficulties the participants faced in challenging dominant language ideologies to achieve a genuinely inclusive and plurilingual educational stance. In doing so, the chapter contributes to the growing body of research on teachers’ readiness to work with plurilingual students in increasingly diversified educational contexts, as well as to the contextual factors that can impact on it.