The research and action topic of diversity is initially about perceiving the diversity of human coexistence, social norms and rules and individual beliefs as a social reality. At the level of teacher training, the challenge is to recognise rigid, exclusionary mechanisms in systems and to expand educational opportunities, because the distribution of opportunities within excluding societies seems to be perpetuating (cf. Allman, 2013).
One aspect of this diversity concerns the variety of human talents. In this context, the focus of pedagogically argued talent education is not so much on emphasising certain support measures for special groups (e.g. high performers in ‘talent education’) as on finding answers as to how children and young people can learn to live their lives in a self-determined way with their diverse strengths (but also weaknesses) and thus make a meaningful contribution to society. Society, in turn, is faced with the task of dealing with this diversity in a meaningful way in order to be able to develop further.
Hansen calls this pedagogical perspective ‘talent development’ and considers educational prerequisites under their collective framework conditions so that people can contribute their talents to the (respective) collective groups in a formative way (see Hansen 2012, 51f).
Reflecting on these two areas of tension (diversity and talent), which needs to be dealt with in a situation-appropriate manner, is one of the central characteristics of professional action in the teaching profession (cf. Ilien, 2009). At the Chair, we try to use the potential of the capability approach (Sen/Nussbaum) for these questions.
