Roles, Tools and Practices of Teachers within Inclusive Schools
Summary
The education of students with disabilities in general education classrooms, often referred to as inclusion, is an increasingly popular way to organize special education programs. Yet meeting the needs of learners in heterogeneous classrooms is a challenge for educators. As school increasingly place students in more inclusive settings, teachers’ roles and responsibilities are often ambiguous and undefined. This project aims to explore the roles, tools and practices employed by teachers in inclusive educational settings, and the role formal and informal organizational structures and policies play in supporting inclusive practices. Guided by community of practice and activity system theories we will study patterns of interaction in inclusive schools and classrooms. In studying activity systems lodged within formal organizational structures and subject to external policy pressure, we will also draw on and contribute to an emerging theoretical framework that seeks to integrate socio-cultural theories of learning with institutional theories of organizations. Our study will proceed in two stages. During phase one, we will conduct comparative embedded case studies of inclusive classrooms in two secondary schools implementing inclusion programs: one school with a mature inclusion program and the other in the process of transitioning from traditional self-contained special education classes to a nascent inclusion model. In phase two, we will employ a design-based approach to support the implementation of effective practices (derived from phase one) at a local secondary school.
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