Topic

Guidance as a tool for inclusive processes in classrooms

Research questions

In which way can guidance of teachers have influence on teachers inclusive practice and how may it affect practice?

What kind of approaches, strategies and methods of interventions do inclusive supervisors use and how can these assist to develop including practices in the classrooms?

Conceptual and Theoretical framework

In my current Ph.d. project I am studying how dialectic processes between supervisors within the field of inclusive education and teachers can have influence on inclusive processes in practice. Furthermore my study focuses on strategies, methods and approaches used by the supervisors. When teachers find that up to twenty five percent of the pupils are challenging and having behavior problems, there is much to indicate that inclusive education in Danish elementary schools represents a major challenge (Nordahl, 2010). A study from EVA 2011 (The Danish Evaluation Institute) emphasizes that centrally placed resource persons are necessary for teachers in their work with creating inclusive practices in the classrooms. Approx. 61% of teachers nationwide in Denmark have already cooperated with centrally placed resource persons to create more inclusive practice in the classrooms.

Therefore this project sets out to develop the teachers’ educational and pedagogical competencies by studying how guidance of teachers may provide to improve inclusive processes in classrooms.

Roger Slee indicates that an interface between two cultures inclusive practices implies in the schools. A pathological troubleshooter culture in which the teacher's have power to segregate children and a culture where inclusion and the thought of inclusion is a new initiative, a new way of thinking in which the contexts and the relational perspective are determining factors (Slee, 2011). In the empirical data from my study I also find that teachers preconceptions about seeing the pupil with an inherent pathology are being challenged in the guidance processes and that teachers are getting a nascent awareness about how the potentials a relational and contextual perspective contains in relation to inclusive practices.

When Slee refers to the fact that an inclusive school calls for a new and different way of doing and thinking about schooling, he also refers to the teaching cultures, the political agenda of school and class culture. According to Slee the thinking is limited and unsustainable when inclusion is going to be about placing children with special needs in an unchanged public school. There must instead be incorporated new teaching practices and new ways of looking to relate to the general school for all (Slee, 2011). My study shows that supervisors are working with several dimensions in guidance processes, such as preconceptions, pedagogical approaches and the culture within the classroom. According to Slee diversity should be considered to be a natural part of a social learning strategy and inclusive thinking will therefore benefit all children (Slee, 2011). Furthermore a report from EVA 2013 shows that sixty eight percent of Danish teachers experience the task of creating inclusive learning environments as critical or predominantly critical. My study also shows that an intervention could support the teachers on these critical tasks by developing teachers pedagogical competencies, giving them pedagogical tools and support the teachers approaches and culture in the classrooms.

Outline of presentation at ECER

At the ECER conference in 2014 my research design will be presented briefly and the phenomenological approach and the phenomenological analytical method will be elaborated. Subsequent focus will be on a model of themes drawing upon data from the project. Thus the intention is to show how different themes and meaningful dimensions can emerge from the data by using a phenomenological analysis approach.

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