Investigating pre-service teachers’ attitudes towards lesbian, gay, and bisexual students in Luxembourg

Lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) students face victimization in multiple contexts, the educational context included. Here, teachers can serve as an important resource for LGB- students. However, teachers holding prejudice against students of sexual minorities may be unable to fulfil this role. Those teachers have, for instance, been found to be less likely to adopt a mentoring role or interrupt homophobic behaviours in school. Accordingly, it is important to find out more about teachers' attitudes and their correlates, as this can provide starting points for sensitizing interventions in teacher education programs which potentially improve the situation of LGB-students in the school setting. In the present pre-registered questionnaire study, we investigated the attitudes of 138 pre-service teachers from the University of Luxembourg towards LGB-students and tried to identify predictors of teacher attitudes. Results suggested that Luxembourgish pre-service teachers hold mostly positive attitudes towards LGB-students. Using correlation and multiple regression analyses, we identified participants’ frequency of contact with LGB-people in family or friend networks, hypergendering tendencies, sexual orientation, and religiosity as reliable predictors for attitudes towards LGB-students. Age, gender, and right-wing conservatism did not reliably predict the pre-service teachers’ attitudes in the regression model. Our findings thus suggest confirmation of the intergroup contact theory and have implications for teacher education in Luxembourg.