Preparing Teachers to Work in Inclusive Classrooms

Abstract

The increasing cultural, linguistic, and developmental diversity of today’s classrooms demands more inclusive approaches to schooling, but classroom teachers often report feeling unprepared for inclusive education. This article reports some lessons learned from the Inclusive Practice Project, a teacher education reform project that has developed an innovative approach to preparing teachers to enter a profession in which they take responsibility for the learning and achievement of all students. It identifies four crucial issues, describes how they were addressed, and considers the challenges of professional development of teacher educators that emerged from the project studies. Key lessons focusing on the professional development of teacher educators in the establishment of a new curricular approach to teacher education for inclusive education are discussed.

Keywords

diversity special education preservice education

Introduction

Today’s schools are very different from the schools where many of those who currently prepare tomorrow’s teachers taught. In Europe, demographic changes coexist with a policy shift in many countries as they move away from dual-track systems of regular and special education toward more inclusive education systems (European Agency for Development in Special Needs Education [EADSNE], 2011), where issues of race, ethnicity, social class, language learning (bilingual and plurilingual), religious diversity, gender, and disability are covered to varying degrees by different national policies of social and educational inclusion. Like other countries in Europe and elsewhere, Scotland has been undergoing rapid economic and social change. Many rural schools are receiving non-English-speaking children for the first time, while some schools in urban areas enroll a majority of students for whom English is not their first language. As more and more primary (ages 5-12 years) and secondary (ages 11-18) schools enroll ethnic minority students, they have also become more inclusive of learners identified with disabilities and other additional support needs as policy developments continue to reinforce and strengthen the right of every student to attend a mainstream school. The challenges of today’s classrooms—their increasing cultural, linguistic, and developmental diversity, along with the pressure to achieve high academic standards for everybody—has led to an educational reform agenda in Scotland that calls for more inclusive approaches to schooling, to a broad definition of additional support needs, and to more coherent and integrated children’s services across education, health, and social services.

All of these reforms have implications for teacher education and teacher professional development. The EADSNE (2011) recently concluded a 25-country report on teacher education for inclusion (TE4I) that examined the knowledge, skills, understanding, and values that would be needed by all teachers for an inclusive society. Importantly, the TE4I study noted that many countries now use the term inclusion to refer to a much broader range of learners who are vulnerable to the forces of educational and social exclusion than is permitted by the term special educational needs. It reflects a view of special education as an artifact of a country’s schooling structures, teaching approaches, and systems of assessment, acknowledging that whether students are in need of special education support depends on the extent to which school organizational structures and staff are sufficiently flexible in adapting the curriculum and teaching strategies. It is important to note that most European countries do not have separate initial teacher education programs or certification requirements for special education. Such specialist knowledge would be available for experienced teachers through continuing professional development (CPD), which may lead to higher degrees.

The TE4I report also reflects a growing consensus that teacher education reform has an important role to play in promoting greater inclusion, but research is needed “to support a more rigorous system for evaluating initial teacher education courses to inform further development” (Donnelly & Watkins, 2011, p. 349). While there are vigorous debates occurring within different national contexts about what teachers need to know and how they should be prepared to respond to the increasing cultural, linguistic, and developmental diversity of schools across Europe, studies that explore the questions for multicultural teacher education posed by Cochran-Smith (2003)—“the diversity question,” “the ideology question,” “the knowledge question,” “the teacher learning question,” “the practice question,” “the outcomes question,” “the recruitment/selection question,” and “the coherence question” (p. 10)—are helpful in generating the knowledge base upon which a pedagogy of teacher education for inclusive education can be articulated.

These questions require studies that embrace the complex nature of “teaching about teaching and learning about teaching” (Loughran, 2002). This is of particular importance to reforms of teacher education intended to promote more inclusive approaches to schooling because as the TE4I report has documented, systematic work on this issue is only just beginning. One problem that has received little consideration is that many teacher educators may not have had experience of inclusive education when they were teaching, nor may they agree with its associated approaches to teaching and learning. Knowledge about how teacher educators engage with the concept of inclusion is necessary to teacher education reform efforts, not only because new teachers report feeling unprepared to work in inclusive classrooms (Forlin, 2010) but, as will be shown, also because teacher educators often share this feeling of being unprepared. The argument put forth in this article is that responsiveness to a changing education landscape requires the professional development needs of teacher educators to be addressed as part of the reform of teacher education for inclusion.

This article reports some lessons learned from the Inclusive Practice Project (IPP), a Scottish government funded research and development project based at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland that has developed an innovative approach to preparing primary and secondary classroom teachers to view themselves as inclusive practitioners (Graham, Bruce, & Munro, 2011). It describes how key assumptions about human differences and diversity are being addressed within a 1-year (postgraduate) initial teacher education program, the Professional Graduate Diploma in Education (PGDE), and identifies key issues for the professional development of teacher educators that emerged from the insights generated by the findings from a study of the course reforms and an inductive analysis of project data.

Scotland’s IPP

At the time the IPP was initiated, a new Scottish Framework for Professional Recognition/Registration (General Teaching Council for Scotland [GTCS], 2007) had established standards for initial teacher education (SITE) that required the development of competencies in inclusive education. However, because inclusive education is a contested concept characterized by a great deal of variability in practice, the starting point in developing the IPP approach to initial teacher education was to identify key issues to be addressed. Rather than focus on the development of dispositions (Katz & Raths, 1985), the IPP considered issues of pedagogical content knowledge (Van Driel & Berry, 2012) linked to Shulman’s (2005) conceptualization of professional learning as apprenticeships of the head (knowledge), hand (skill), and heart (attitudes and beliefs). This also linked to the Scottish SITE (GTCS, 2007), which have three main elements: “professional knowledge and understanding, professional skills and abilities, and professional values and personal commitment.” This conceptualization was used as a foundation to frame the interactive strands that were emerging from development work as an approach to teacher education for inclusive education. The key strands were (a) theoretical clarity about what teachers would need to know, be able to do, and to believe if they were to become “inclusive practitioners”; (b) a decision about how these three elements would be embedded in the reformed course; (c) specifying what would count as evidence of inclusive practice; and (d) a research strategy that would interrogate the theoretical ideas as well as provide new insights and further understanding about what teachers need to know and be able to do to respond to the increasing diversity of Scottish schools. The sections below summarize how these issues were addressed through a collaborative process of engagement with the teacher educators who were part of the course and teaching teams.

Theoretical Clarity About What Teachers Need to Know, Be Able to Do, and to Believe if They Are to Become “Inclusive Practitioners”

At the outset of the IPP, there were discussions about how to engage with research that explored the extent to which inclusion and achievement were mutually exclusive or complementary concepts (Dyson, Farrell, Polat, Hutcheson, & Gallannaugh, 2004; Lunt & Norwich, 1999; Rouse & Florian, 2006; Ruijs, Van der Veen, & Peetsma, 2010). This was of particular significance for the IPP because many teachers resist efforts to include students identified as having special or additional support needs in their classrooms on the grounds that their inclusion will interfere with the effective education of others. However, in Scotland, the definition of additional support needs had been broadened in part as a strategic response to concerns about underachievement in schools. As a result, students with many different kinds of difficulties in learning were likely to be considered in need of additional support. Therefore, it was important to consider how teacher educators might engage with these issues as part of initial teacher education.

In a parallel strand of research (Black-Hawkins & Florian, in press; Black-Hawkins, Florian, & Rouse, 2007; Florian & Black-Hawkins, 2011; Rouse & Florian, 2006), we had been studying how some teachers are able to be highly inclusive while improving academic standards over time, when others argue that this is not possible. These studies had shown that teachers who are able to do this have changed the way they think about the concept of inclusive education. Rather than only accommodating learner differences, they focus on extending what is available to everybody. This focus on learning as a shared activity is a subtle but important shift in thinking about individual differences between learners that avoids the potentially negative effects of treating some students as different. The IPP research team was interested in using what we had learned and are still learning from these experienced teachers to articulate a principled approach to the relationship between teaching and learning and to use these principles to underpin the development of a course to support the learning and professional development of new teachers.

To this end, the IPP approach to initial teacher education was based on a concept of inclusive pedagogy (Florian, 2010; Florian & Kershner, 2009) that has emerged from a synthesis of our research studies of the craft knowledge of experienced teachers committed to inclusive practice and the literature on inclusive education and specialist pedagogy. In brief, inclusive pedagogy aims to avoid the stigma or marginalization that can occur when students’ individual differences are isolated and targeted for intervention. The approach is located within a sociocultural framework on pedagogy (Alexander, 2004) where the complexities inherent in providing for differences between students are subsumed within a set of interrelated ideas about children, learning, teaching, and the curriculum. Inclusive pedagogy encourages open-ended views of all children’s potential for learning and encourages teachers to extend the range of options that are available to everyone in the community of the classroom.

Making Decisions About How Content Knowledge Would Be Embedded in the Reformed Course

A second key concern was that the content knowledge contained in a supplementary or optional course in “social inequality” or “inclusive education” would add to, rather than change, much of the existing course content. To avoid this, the IPP team worked with colleagues from across the School of Education, local authority representatives, classroom teachers, and recent program graduates (the course team) to consider the different ways in which practicing teachers and schools have become more inclusive of children who might have found learning and participation difficult in the past so that a shared understanding of these teachers’ practice could be built into a new course. In the short time that student teachers are in initial training, it is impossible to anticipate every type of challenge or difficulty they might meet in their professional lives. To prepare teachers who would meet the SITE requirements for inclusive education, a new curricular approach based on a deep respect for and understanding of how experienced teachers respond to student diversity (McIntyre, 2009) while improving standards of achievement for everyone was needed. It was agreed that issues of individual difference should not be decontextualized from the broader (mainstream) pedagogical and curriculum imperatives that trainee teachers have to learn and be able to apply when they begin teaching.

Specifying What Counts as Evidence of Inclusive Practice

The criticism of inclusive education as a “theory that has outpaced its practice” (Artiles, Kozleski, Dorn, & Christensen, 2006, p. 97) highlights a lack of conceptual clarity in the literature about what counts as inclusive practice and how it might be evidenced. This was a third key concern for the IPP research team. Judgments about the appropriateness of inclusive practice can be hard to make, because what appear to be similar events may be inclusive or exclusive. For example, technology can be used to include and exclude. A student working at a computer terminal may be involved in an interactive classroom activity (inclusion) or marginalized by being set work to do at his or her “level” (exclusion). A child who is sitting alone at a table may have chosen this as a legitimate activity (inclusion) or he or she may be experiencing “time-out” (exclusion). The challenge for the IPP would be to see a complex process in operation. To identify the extent to which the theoretical principles eventually adopted (discussed below) were embedded in the course was one issue, but there were also methodological questions about how the principles embedded in the course might be observed in practice.

A Research Strategy

A fourth key issue addressed the complex processes involved in developing, embedding, and simultaneously researching the IPP, while also continuing to study and learn from the practices of teachers committed to inclusive practice. This necessitated a consideration of how to develop a reciprocal process based on research-based practice and practice-based research. While the research questions that formed the nucleus of the IPP project were generated by the project aims and objectives, the expertise and interests of teacher education colleagues contributed enormously to the generation of new knowledge about inclusive practice, children’s learning, and teacher education. As both a development and a research project, the IPP relied on mixed methods in developing, embedding, and simultaneously researching the IPP. The research strategy was structured around investigations of four areas of activity that enabled the research team to “think aloud” (Clark, 1988, p. 10) as we grappled with the tensions and dilemmas presented by working with a contested concept. Three areas of activity focused on (a) students’ attitudes and beliefs (Beacham & Rouse, 2012), (b) the course reforms (Florian & Linklater, 2010; Florian, Young, & Rouse, 2010), and (c) a follow-up study of graduates (Florian & Spratt, 2012). A fourth area of interest, and the focus of this article, explored teacher educators’ engagement with the concept of inclusive pedagogy as documented in the record of project activities and studied retrospectively at the end of a 3-year data collection period.

Learning from Teacher Education Colleagues

The IPP research and development team was interested in how teacher educators engaged with a complex reform process that involved changes to an existing initial teacher education program that were both practical (e.g., structural reforms to the program) and theoretical (embedding inclusive pedagogical approaches into course content), but this was not initially planned as a systematic study. As participant observers, the research team was mindful of the many ethical issues involved in undertaking such an investigation, particularly with regard to informed consent, the power relationships between the researcher and the researched, and the potential problems of making or of being perceived to be making value judgments about colleagues. Given that the research and development processes were simultaneous, teacher education colleagues were viewed as collaborators who engaged with the reform agenda in varying degrees. As in other schools of education, there were many differences of opinion within the teaching team about whether, what, and how the reforms should proceed, and to this extent, Aberdeen should be considered a case example of a typical site for reform, ideal for generating in situ understandings about how teacher educators engaged with course reforms intended to support a teacher education for inclusion agenda. The following sections provide a brief overview of the reforms and the study that prompted the IPP to consider the professional development needs of teacher educators an important finding of the project.

Theoretical Reforms

At the beginning of the IPP, the term inclusive pedagogy was not used consistently, as its conceptualization was still in development. However, the need for clarity about what teachers need to know and be able to do as they are preparing to enter a profession that accepts responsibility for the learning of all students led to the articulation of key ideas associated with the development of inclusive practice. Initially, these were outlined in an internal discussion paper (IPP, 2007) where, consistent with the findings from the studies of experienced teachers’ practice described above, inclusive education was presented as an accommodation of individual differences within the structures and processes that are available to all learners. It was argued that the accommodation of individual differences should be thought of as an ordinary part of all teachers’ responses when students experience difficulties and that such responses required new ways of working with others. The task was not to defend the need to accommodate learner differences by the provision of something “different from” or “additional to” for some learners, as defined in the Additional Support for Learning Act, 2004 (Scottish Executive 2005), but to extend what is “generally available” to others of similar age. Over time as these ideas were developed, and debated within the course team, they became what the teaching team called the “spine” of the professional studies element of the PGDE, as displayed in Table 1.

Table 1.

Inclusive Pedagogical Practice Approach Linked to Course Themes

Underlying assumptions	Actions	Key challenges	PGDE course themes/units
Difference must be accounted for as an essential aspect of human development in any conceptualization of learning	Replacing deterministic views of ability with a concept of transformability	“Bell-curve” thinking and notions of fixed ability still underpin the structure of schooling	Understanding learning

Teachers must believe (can be convinced) that they are qualified/capable of teaching all children	Demonstrating how the difficulties students experience in learning can be considered dilemmas for teaching rather than problems within students	The identification of difficulties in learning and the associated focus on what the learner cannot do often puts a ceiling on learning and achievement	Understanding social Justice

The profession must develop creative new ways of working with others	Modeling new creative ways of working with and through others	Change the way we think about inclusion (from “most” and “some” to everybody)	Becoming an active professional

Having identified the theoretical concepts that would drive the content of the reforms, the key practical issue became how to embed them into a new program that was already undergoing other structural changes in response to policy guidance in Scotland. Deliberate decisions were made to teach about issues of diversity and social justice in education at the beginning of the program to make the point that difference is part of the human condition. The book Learning Without Limits (Hart, Dixon, Drummond, & McIntyre, 2004) was adopted as a core text to replace notions of fixed ability with the idea of transformability, which Hart and her colleagues used to assert the principled belief that “children’s capacity to learn can change and be changed for the better as a result of what happens and what people do in the present” (p. 166). The “anti-determinist” stance taken in this book promoted an open-ended view of students’ capacity to learn rather than something that is fixed or can be predicted based on standardized assessments.

Practical Reforms

Two important decisions taken a year earlier by school staff were considered foundational to the course, and the development team addressed the IPP challenges within this context. These decisions were to combine primary and secondary student teachers for professional studies lectures and tutor groups and to work in close partnership with local authority schools. The decision to combine primary and secondary student teachers for professional studies was taken when the program review revealed how much the existing separate professional studies courses had in common and that the alignment and streamlining of some of this teaching would save teaching time as well as provide important learning opportunities. This structural reform challenged the assumption that training teachers for children of different ages is best achieved by having different teacher education programs, enabling further consideration of whether and what specialist training was required for working with certain students identified as “different.”

Working in partnership with schools acknowledges that students become teachers partly by working in schools, and this requires that university-based tutors recognize and engage with the learning that occurs during students’ school placement. In Scotland, the expectation is that all schools are potential placements for student teachers and the university does not vet the schools where student teachers are placed. As a result, the IPP needed to support the development of a university-based course where students were encouraged to engage in critical and reflective practice while simultaneously maintaining respect for and suspending judgments about the practices they were observing in school, particularly when those practices were inconsistent with the ideas they were learning in the university (for further details of this, see Florian & Linklater, 2010).

Combining Theoretical and Practical Reforms

As the spine of the new program, the professional studies course of the PGDE became the vehicle to promote the key messages and underpinning principles in relation to the aims of the IPP as articulated in Table 1. These teaching sessions were held throughout the year before and after school placement. The school-based element of the PGDE comprises a series of school placements (18 weeks in total) in two different schools with scheduled visits from university staff (school experience tutors) where lessons are observed and examined. During academic year 2007-2008, 14 tutorial groups averaging 27 students (n = 388) were staffed by a teaching team of primary and secondary teacher education lecturers, many of whom had little or no previous experience of special, inclusive, multicultural, or bilingual education. Consequently, the practical reforms were extended to consider issues of professional development for teacher educators, and the IPP team began to offer formal and informal meetings with tutors to discuss the course readings and activities as well as to debrief after-class sessions.

Embedding the theoretical ideas into the course reform heightened awareness of the contested nature of the ideas that underpinned the reforms (these are discussed in Florian, Linklater, & Young, 2011). Doing so also reinforced the practical decision to draw upon practice-based studies of the craft knowledge of experienced teachers in shaping the pedagogical content knowledge about inclusion. As these studies suggested, teaching student teachers to challenge complacency about what is generally available by extending learning opportunities for everyone in the classroom community would be a complex task. It required both teacher educators and students to develop sensitivity to differences between learners without perpetuating the stigmatizing effects of marking some students as different.

Studying the Course Reforms

Shifting the gaze from “most” and “some” learners to “everybody” required a research design and methods that would capture these complexities. To this end, the study of the course reforms (Florian et al., 2010; Florian et al., 2011) adopted a mixed methodological approach to data analysis that permitted a deductive exploration of how the theoretical reforms were operationalized along with an inductive interest in what we could learn about them that might lead to new theoretical insights. A coding system for mapping the course reforms was developed. With the consent of colleagues and students, videos were made of the weekly PGDE lectures, and tutorial and seminar groups were audio recorded to explore the extent to which the theoretical concepts underpinning of the course reforms were embedded. The records were transcribed and then analyzed using “Transana,” a software package that enabled researchers in different locations to work collaboratively in real time to address the relationship between developing theory relating to inclusive pedagogy, and using this theory to create and understand curricular reform of the program while it was taking place (for a detailed discussion, see Young & Florian, in press).

An interesting finding from the study of the curriculum reform was the power of personal stories as pedagogic tools used by teacher educators to communicate course content. However, many teacher educators have little or no experience of inclusive education placing them in a position, as one of our colleagues put it, of having to prepare teachers to teach in ways that they themselves did not teach when they were in the classroom. Requiring teacher educators to prepare new teachers for inclusive education puts them in the uncomfortable position of teaching something of which they have little or no experience. Given the importance of personal stories as pedagogic tools for teacher educators, it is hardly surprising that there were some tensions and variability in the engagement of different teacher educators with the course content of the project.

CPD for Teacher Educators

Throughout the project, feedback from teaching and research colleagues at open meetings was used to deepen understanding of the reforms. Over time, this process led to the insight that teacher educators needed opportunities for professional development that would support them in preparing new teachers for the demands of inclusive education. Symeonidou and Phtiaka (2009) used survey research to show how teachers’ prior knowledge of inclusion could be used to inform in-service courses that were both academically robust and professionally useful: What could be learned from the experience at Aberdeen that might help identify such opportunities for teacher educators?

Over the course of the IPP, members of the research team took field notes during staff and teaching team meetings to supplement the meeting minutes that recorded the development work. The research process was open to all staff in the school, and regular opportunities for discussion were offered to the teaching team. School-wide research forums were held in June of each year to report on the work of the IPP and to consult with staff about next steps. Formal semistructured interviews were conducted with key members of the teaching team (the two course coordinators) in December 2008. A methodological memo (MM) that was generated during the 3-year study of the course reforms (2007-2010) documented the many informal discussions and debates that characterized the implementation of the course. These documents formed the data sources that supported an inductive analysis of the professional development needs of teacher educators. This was achieved by continuously reviewing the data to identify recurrent themes to generate some initial ideas about the issues and problems raised as the teaching team (tutors) engaged with the practical implications of a complex reform that was both theoretical and contested. Two members of the research team undertook the analysis, working independently first to reduce the data by identifying patterns that became themes, second to confirm the thematic coding of the data, and finally to identify examples of events that illustrated the themes (Luker, 2008). Three themes emerged. These were different understandings of inclusion, the search for common ground, and uncertainty about evidencing inclusive practice.

Different Understandings of Inclusion

As the craft knowledge studies of experienced teachers’ practice, noted above, began to reveal a picture of inclusive practice as one where the teacher’s gaze shifts from “most” and “some” learners to “everybody”, the initial ideas driving the course reform gave way to an integrated focus on extending what is generally available to all learners as an alternative to providing for “all” by differentiating for “some,” particularly in situations where the differentiation was based on judgments about ability. This led to a theoretical stance that required replacing some long-standing notions about learning and learners, such as those perpetuated by “bell-curve” thinking (Fendler & Muzaffar, 2008; Hart, 1998) with ideas that do not impose such limits (Hart et al., 2004). Nevertheless, not everyone teaching on the new program agreed with this stance. Some colleagues insisted that bell-curve explanations were helpful ways of thinking about teaching and learning for everyone. However, as one of the course coordinator’s noted, the general view of inclusion at the start of the IPP was that it was about “special needs,” and “inclusive practice” was viewed as the domain of a few members of staff who had specialist knowledge of this topic.

Searching for Common Ground

The development work undertaken during 2006-2007 created an important space within which different understandings about inclusion could be debated. These discussions were supplemented by presentations given by the IPP research team that explored the challenges and dilemmas associated with developing inclusive practice. As noted above, this was conceptualized as a pedagogical approach that extended what was generally available to an increasingly diverse student population and avoided the limitations of approaches that included all students by differentiating for some. Because many teacher education colleagues shared concerns about the long tail of underachievement for the lowest 20% of students, who often attend the same schools as high achievers (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD], 2007), they recognized the importance of preparing teachers to meet the project objectives in light of social, economic, and demographic changes in Scotland. The agreement to combine primary and secondary student teachers for the professional studies element of the PGDE reflected a consensus that teaching approaches across of all subjects of the curriculum and phases of schooling also had much in common. It is possible that when the task of inclusion was described in terms of extending what was generally available rather than adding special education approaches to an already overloaded mainstream teacher education program, it seemed less daunting.

The meetings seemed to me to really clear the air (for those who needed it cleared) and help people see the purposes of the project and really showed me people’s willingness to look at their own practice and think about the issues surrounding inclusion and their practice. I found these to be an overwhelming positive experience and had the sense that everyone else I talked to did as well. (MM, September 2008)

The common ground that enabled colleagues to transcend or at least negotiate other differences was the principled belief that all children could learn. To the extent the different views about how to teach teachers about how this learning was best facilitated were maintained, we endeavored to suspend judgment about ideological and professional knowledge questions but engage in collegial debate instead. In one instance, this led to publications where differences were explored through scholarship (Florian, 2010; Ravet, 2011).

There was also evidence that the tentative and exploratory stance of “extending what is generally available” taken by the research team enabled primary and secondary teacher education colleagues to link their own understandings and practices to the idea of inclusion, rather than learn something new that was unconnected to their own prior experience. As one colleague who initially resisted the IPP approach put it: “But you are asking me to prepare teachers to teach in a way that I did not teach myself!” (MM, May 2009). It was only when we found that we agreed on other important issues such as the primacy of belonging, and the responsibility that teachers have to care, as well as teach, that bridges were built between the curriculum subject teacher educator and the inclusion specialist.

I visited with Essie and went over the study design with her, step by step. I sent her the coding glossary and the coding guide. When the transcript has been coded I will send it to her as well. We talked a little about how useful her lecture would be to the research since it is not exactly about inclusive practice. But then looking over the codes, it was obvious that her information does apply to a lot of the themes we are interested in. (MM, July 2008)

Over time, the decision not to specify or direct the tutors practice paid dividends. In an interview with one of the professional studies tutors, she reflected,

Tutors are now able to help make connections, to look at children holistically, valuing the person, not differences. As the project has been on-going, people now talk about social justice and inclusive practice. It is not seen as the domain of a few members of staff. We still go to people with expertise but we know we can do this ourselves. “Learning without Limits” was a struggle but coming to grips with the ideas ourselves enables us to help students come to grips with the ideas. . . . It has become part of our identity. (Staff interview, December 3, 2008)

Uncertainty About Evidencing Inclusive Practice

Given the contested nature of the concept of inclusion and the many interpretations of the practice of inclusion, the IPP took the view that university-based experiences must be structured in ways that support students to acquire a critical view of the practice they experienced without criticizing what they observed in schools. The study of how we grappled with teaching the ideas articulated in Learning Without Limits (Hart et al., 2004) convinced us that university-based learning opportunities that focus on the general insights of inclusive education in the practical context of classroom teaching (Florian & Linklater, 2010) can play an important role in developing student teachers’ capacity to extend what is generally available to everyone. The problem was in determining how such practices could be evidenced. The research team developed a framework for the follow-up study of PGDE program graduates; however, the teaching team that undertook the observations of school practice did not use this tool. This was partially because the tool itself was not sufficiently developed to use in an evaluation of student teachers’ classroom practice and partially because the course and teaching teams did not feel comfortable in extending or revising what they felt were robust and sufficient procedures for evaluating student teachers’ practice. During staff CPD days, the research team reported on their activities to the staff and took soundings from them on the issues that were being generated by the implementation of the new PGDE. At the June 2008 meeting, a discussion about how to evidence inclusive practice generated a wide-ranging list of suggestions, many of which would not only be hard to evidence but also were not specific enough to distinguish whether a teacher was using an inclusive pedagogical approach. For example,

Can tell by how the initial relationship is developed; How the teacher and pupils deal with failure; You can’t tell the groups (high, med, low); There are opportunities for choice; The relationship between the teacher and children is positive, open, and flexible; The role of the teacher changes according to the activity. (MM, June 2008)

Although the generation of this kind of list is not uncommon or unusual, it is interesting to set it alongside the suggestions the staff made to the IPP research team as well as the issues they raised:

The list of suggestions presented in Table 2 is striking because of what it reveals about what the primary and secondary subject tutors wanted to know about inclusive practice and how they articulated the issues that were important to them. Although many of the issues raised in this list pertain to the research process, these were so closely intertwined with the development work and teaching that the list was not reduced. What it reflects is a high level of critical engagement with the theoretical and practical reforms and an honest account of the intellectual and emotional impact the project was having on their work.

Table 2.

Staff suggestions for the research and development of the IPP Project

Need explicit links to inclusion.

Need liaison between curricular studies, professional studies, and shared sessions.

Need to better articulate how the definition of inclusion relates to the three key concepts:

Replacement of deterministic views of ability with a concept of transformability

Demonstrating how the difficulties students experience in learning can be considered dilemmas for teaching rather than problems within students

Modeling new ways of working with and through others

There are tensions between the theoretical areas and the key concepts and shared understandings.

Research methods need to be aligned with ideas of inclusion (this includes student and tutor voices and how we practice our practice).

Need to elicit tutor reflections alongside student/audience reflections on messages.

Need to create opportunities for such reflections.

Need to elicit the emotions through which socially constructed learning takes place as close to the event as possible.

Think about the sense of emotion in real time versus passing of time in the data collected.

Be aware of chameleon words (reified words that can have many meanings that not everyone agrees upon).

Case studies of holistic impact. Maybe follow students across all aspects of the program.

I’ve appreciated the lovely positive view of children expressed by the speakers, also the focus on lived lives, socially situated learning, unrecognized completeness of children who may not be doing well in the school system. We need to remind students and ourselves, constantly, of the infinite potential of all children. We need to learn how to tap into this.

To what extent do we know how IPP is being taken forward in subjects/shared sessions? How can we start good practices from these?

I’d like to raise a concern: Ned mentioned the place of good material/ideas within “history”; as a tutor on a PG curricular studies area, I’d like to request that the role of supporting inclusive practice within curriculum studies lectures/writings be explicitly linked into Professional Studies. Liaison Please. (MM, June 2008).

Implications for Professional Development of Teacher Educators

The questions teacher education colleagues were asking of both the theoretical concept of inclusion and what it might mean for their practice reflect the debates and concerns about professional knowledge that are occurring elsewhere (EADSNE, 2011). Although the IPP research explored the extent to which the course reforms were embedded into the program, reflected in the attitudes of students, and enacted in the practices of program graduates during the first year of teaching, important lessons were also learned about the professional development needs of teacher educators. The majority of colleagues who were implementing the reforms were mainstream primary and secondary subject specialist tutors. Many initially thought that they did not have the necessary background knowledge and experience to prepare teachers to work in inclusive ways. And yet these same tutors could describe how they were able to make their subject meaningful to all learners or help students overcome difficulties in learning when they were teaching. Opportunities to explore the connections between many school practices, and the challenges to these practices represented by advances in educational theory, is an important aspect of professional learning and development for teachers and teacher educators. A sound foundation for building this development will require open-ended, nonjudgmental explorations that link the prior knowledge, experience, and attitudes of those who are being asked to prepare teachers to teach in schools that are increasingly diverse as well as reflect new innovations and new theoretical ideas about learning.

By building on and making links with practices in schools, university-based teacher education can fulfill its obligation to work in partnership with schools in ways that both respect and challenge current practice. For the IPP, this was an important aspect of the work that responded to McIntyre’s (2009) criticism that beginning teachers are not sufficiently well prepared to deal with student diversity, disability, and other differences because teacher educators have not engaged sufficiently with the work of practicing teachers. In response, the course reforms embedded knowledge about inclusive pedagogy that had emerged from research on the teaching practice of experienced teachers who were able to maintain a commitment to inclusive education and high academic standards for all students. By taking McIntyre’s criticism seriously, the IPP demonstrated one example of how teacher education programs can address the gap between the different kinds of knowledge that are generated by research and practice. To this end, professional development opportunities for teacher educators might include in-depth exploration and focused self-study of the ways in which theoretical ideas about inclusion are enacted in practice and conveyed to prospective teachers.

A key lesson for the IPP was that embracing the contested nature of the inclusion task created the space for shared understandings to emerge. As theoretical clarity was emerging from research in the field and shared with teaching team colleagues through nonjudgmental collaborative development activities, the idea that inclusion is a process of extending what is generally available enabled the research team to view staff professional development as a process of “starting from where you are and what you know.” Tensions between theory and practice and between different theoretical perspectives can be seen as opportunities rather than problems.

Discussion

As calls for all classroom teachers to be better prepared for inclusive education become increasingly common (Blanton, Pugach & Florian, 2011; EADSNE, 2011; Forlin, 2010; Kosnik & Beck, 2009), a consideration of the professional development needs of teacher educators cannot be overstated. It has been more than 20 years since Mittler (1989) compared developments in the areas of special and multicultural education and argued for a joint approach to equalizing educational opportunity because both groups of students had been “denied equality of opportunity to some degree and have suffered varying degrees of depravation, discrimination, and marginalization.” An external evaluation of the IPP (Gallagher, 2011) described the IPP as

a third [new] way of dealing with the challenges of difference and diversity, in a context where there is significant attention paid to school improvement and increasing recognition of the achievement gaps between the highest and lowest achievers . . . the IPP approach gives due regard to the reality of difference while seeking to provide teachers with the concepts and tools that will not allow difference to become reified and hence set limits to the future of some children. (p. 33)

The IPP represents one attempt to engage with the changing demographic of today’s schools that avoids multiple tracks of teacher preparation for different kinds of learners in favor of a focus on preparing class teachers to take responsibility for everyone. As a curricular approach, it provides an example of inclusive education as the spine of professional studies rather than something that is “added-on” to existing teacher education course content.

Inclusive education, with its emphasis on the process of increasing participation and decreasing exclusion, is increasingly accepted as a unified approach to education for all. As this approach has gained currency, the implications for teacher education and for the need for professional development for teacher educators are becoming clearer, but there is a great deal of work to do before Shulman’s (2005) notion of a “signature pedagogy” of teacher education for inclusive education will emerge. Outside of the United States, issues of disability and special educational needs are increasingly considered part of the larger diversity agenda both nationally and as part of the equity issues that are raised in relation to the international “Education for All” movement (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization [UNESCO], 2008). There is value in cross-national work to learn about how others are working together on common concerns to reduce marginalization and exclusion for those who encounter barriers to participation in schooling. The conceptualizations of difference and additional support needs may be different, but it is in these differences—particularly in countries that require all teachers to qualify as teachers first and specialize later—that new insights can be found.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my colleagues in the School of Education at the University of Aberdeen for their generosity in allowing their practice to be scrutinized as part of the research that informed the project.

Author’s Note

The views expressed in this article are those of the author.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by a grant from the Scottish Government to develop new approaches to preparing teachers.

About the Author

Lani Florian was professor of social and educational inclusion at the University of Aberdeen where she worked with colleagues in the School of Education on the reform of initial teacher education as part of the Inclusive Practice Project. She currently holds the Andrew Bell Chair of Education in the Moray House School of Education at the University of Edinburgh.

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