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Inclusive teaching? - more research is needed

Inclusive teaching? - more research is needed

A number of years ago I gave a lecture at one of Sweden's many institutions for teacher education. Afterwards a prospective mathematics teacher came to me and we started discussing different things. I took the opportunity to ask him "Do you get any teaching on special educational issues when learning how to teach Math?" i.e. I was interested to know if, and in what ways, the learning of how to teach math also considered the fact that several pupils experience difficulties in this area. He answer indicated that the prospective Math teachers learned Math, not how to teach it.

I do not mean that this episode is necessarily representative of Swedish teacher eduation in general. However, I believe that the example points to what seems problematic in many contexts. The anecdote illustrates that the teaching of prospective teachers must be developed if they are going to be able to create inclusive classrooms. In order to underpin such teaching more research is needed about how to teach specific contents to pupils of varying ability.

In a school that strives to be inclusive, students with different prerequisites are in the same classroom. As I have described in prior blogs the placement of students in need of special support / with disabilities in ordinary classes is a necessary but not sufficient condition for inclusion. The pupils needs also have to be met in order for schools to be inclusive. This is a great challenge for the teacher, how should you teach students with very different abilities?

It is a fact that a lot of teachers feel uncertain about how to teach pupils in need of special support. Thus, teachers need more knowledge about how they can teach the diversity of students they meet in a school system where special classrooms and special schools are avoided. Further, the special teachers and special educators who support them also need scientifically based knowledge to build their support on. Consequently research is needed which helps to answer the question about how inclusive teaching can be accomplished.

We thus need teaching research that explores how teachers, together with other staff in the school, can be able to meet the diversity of students and the knowledge that such research generates should become a natural element in courses in teacher education. Younger teachers feel a greater uncertainty than those with more experience. It does seem that many of them do not consider that they have received enough knowledge from their teacher training in how to teach a heterogeneous group of students. This problem was illustrated with the anecdote above. If teachers in teacher education neglect didactics a, they probably neglect the needs of the the most vulnerable students' learning too.

A more profound structural problem is the concept of normality that cuts as a knife through the school systems. Historically, the division into normal students and others has given rise to parallel systems, a normal system and a special system. This distinction has been partly re-created in the research, where the teaching of normal pupils was focused in educational research, while questions about the pupils who were considered deviating became an object of special education. A distinction made in the organization of schooling has thus largely been reproduced in research about the school. My point here is that if we want to break this historical trend and create more inclusive schools, research on teaching should be expanded and also include those students who have been the subject of special education. In a similar vein, students in teacher education has to receive knowledge about how they should teach a diversity of pupils.
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