The European Union recognizes the role of Education as a fundamental key for a change towards an inclusive, innovative and reflective societies (Horizon 2020); education can be interpreted as a form of transition that helps and supports people to change their life, reducing exclusion and barriers to social participation. Research in education is perceived an essential way to promote the values for a more inclusive society in Europe. Since the concept of inclusion is rising within the educational policies of most European countries, we are interested to study how future teachers in training develop inclusive attitudes during their education at the university. The role of the school is crucial to support students and promote a best transition towards an inclusive society, so the teachers have the direct responsibility to enact the inclusive approach in their classrooms. To be effectively inclusive in their practice, the teachers need to be prepared not only in terms of teaching competences and strategies but also they need to be supported in developing inclusive attitudes. Starting from this perspective, the aims of our research is to explore how the inclusive values are related to the teaching practice and which is the role of teachers’ education in developing inclusive attitudes, in the Italian educational background.

The research questions are:

- how teachers understand inclusion

- which are the significant relations between values, teacher education and future practice

- how teachers’ education promote positively the development of inclusive attitudes.

The theoretical framework that underpins our research is related to the concept of inclusion as it is explained by the Education For All (Unesco, 2000) documents, thus: as a right-based process to guarantee a basic quality lifelong education for all the people independently from any individual,  social or economical disadvantage (i.e. disability, cultural diversity, poverty). Avoiding the barriers to participation is a key principle for a inclusive teaching approach (Booth and Ainscow, 2011), as well as putting inclusive values into action against every kind of exclusion within the classroom or the school. The concept of inclusive pedagogy (Florian, 2010) that is guiding this research focuses on the important role of the teachers that could be inclusive in their classroom using a vary range of strategies in response to the students’ difference. To do this, the teachers have to adopt and develop, during their education, inclusive attitudes based on the respect of diversity as a natural human beings features. Nowadays, the idea of inclusive education is often translated into differentiation for some students that can’t follow the main lesson; the inclusive pedagogy’s perspective considers that approach not really inclusive but still belonging to a special education style. Inclusive pedagogy’s perspective proposes a wider meaning of inclusion that is not only related to include students with disability in a regular school system (special education), but concerns the response to every kind of differences of the students avoiding to mark or label the single student because of his/her diversity.

Furthermore, the research here presented aims to study the inclusive attitudes of the teachers in training through the guide of six aspects of understanding (explanation, interpretation, application, perspective, empathy, self knowledge) developed within the backward design model (Wiggins and McTighe, 2005). We are trying to use this model, originally conceived as a teaching strategy, in a innovative way applying it to educational research as better is explained in the methodology section. 

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