Increasingly, teachers are being asked to adopt their classrooms to include students with a wide backgrounds and capabilities. The placement of students with diverse abilities in a regular school does not guarantee high-quality education, though. Schools often feel under-resourced and unprepared to teach the students. UNICEF conducted a study in 2012 that involved participant teachers from over one hundred countries and slightly over 33% of respondents indicated that information about inclusive education was not covered during their teacher education. Similar studies were done in Australia and had comparable findings.
In order to help teachers build an inclusive classroom we have created this guide using the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education.
When teachers understand a strong rationale behind inclusion, they tend to develop positive beliefs about inclusion. According to the theory of planned behavior, a person’s actual behavior could be predicted based on the individual’s intentions to perform the behavior. For example, whether a teacher will include a learner with a disability in his or her classroom depends on the teacher’s intention to include the learner. Intentions are influenced by three closely related psychosocial constructs of attitudes, perceived competence, and subjective norms (how significant people in the environment evaluate the behavior).
Featured image: Photo by Nathan Dumlao. Public domain via Unsplash.
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