Over the past two decades significant actions have been documented in the direction of developing training programs for teachers and raising awareness on issues of social inclusion and educational rights of people with learning disabilities in Romania, with governmental and international support from major organizations such as UNESCO or UNICEF (Ghergut, 2012; Vrasmas and Vrasmas, 2007; Voicu and Baba, 2010). Yet little if anything has been researched and published with regard to the learning participants have experienced in these programs. Albeit some reports document participant teachers’ degree of satisfaction with the training programs, based on measurements of their perception of relevance of the proposed pedagogical knowledge (Vrasmas and Vrasmas, 2007), almost nothing is known of how they experienced, if any, the learning and professional development those programs and training initiatives intended for them. Nor is the literature richer in evidence of the ways in which the medium and long-term effects of these programs have manifested at individual and at collective (organizational) level. Yet, having to effectively make possible the seamless inclusion of learners with various typologies and degrees of learning disabilities in the mainstream classrooms is today one prominent national and continental priority in the political discourses on education.

It is argued that the language and observational data from semi-structured interviews and video recordings of practitioners attempting to produce everyday pedagogical responses to the challenges of teaching inclusive classrooms is the depositary of valuable insight into how teachers learn and into what matters most to them and to the schools, and may explain why and how they enact, individually and collectively, professional responses to everyday classroom realities.

The research questions set out to explore are:  (Q1) What roles do enquiry and collaborative knowledge work play in professional development and learning to teach for inclusion and diversity in Romanian inclusive schools?; (Q1) How do the common narratives on learning to teach for diversity and inclusion emerge – is it the production and deployment of narrative or is it holding on to existing narratives taking precedence in authoring narratives on learning for diversity and inclusion in the Romanian schools?;  (Q3)How might the emergent narratives on learning for diversity and inclusion support strategic development?

The proposed objectives are: (a) to understand the role and characteristics of language and reasoning in actions involving teachers working on producing everyday pedagogical responses to the challenges of Romanian inclusive classrooms through collaborative and enquiry based professional development settings such as those created through Lesson Study approaches; (b) to examine the dynamic of interactions between the various voices playing into the narratives of learning to teach for diversity and inclusion, at various levels of pedagogical decision; (c) to explore the relation between high levels of investment in enquiry based and collaborative learning to teach for diversity and inclusion and successful organizational learning (school improvement) and organizational performance (school effectiveness).

The proposed approach takes notice of  Vermunt’s (2016) critical reading of current models of teacher professional development, striving to move enquiry and exploratory work beyond the levels of what and why supports learning, onto understanding how learning is conceptualized and shaped in the dynamic co-construction of narratives, minding their dialogicality (Wertsch, 2002), and documenting narratives of motives within discrete practices whilst exploring possible shifts onto the construction of a common narrative, encompassing and shaping what matters in each contributing practice (Holland et al., 1998, apud.  Fancourt et al, 2015). 

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