Preschool attendance in Sweden are considered a right for the families and are provided to more than 90 % of children, including children with disability and special educational needs. Most of the children therefore attend inclusive early education settings. We wanted to conduct empirical studies in these inclusive early education settings in order to evaluate the quality of inclusion and to find areas of improvement that may be relevant to work with for special educators in their practice and in special educators training. Observations, discussions with preschool teachers and special educators and previous research (Jansson et al. 2007; Melin, 2009; Lundqvist et al. 2016) has highlighted particular challenges for teachers in promoting interaction in play situation between children with special educational needs and their typically developing peers. However, there are examples of promising approaches for supporting play skills and interactions in inclusive settings (Barton, 2016).
A role for special educators in preschool could be to support the teachers in developing children’s play activities so that all children are engaged in play situations and develop the social skills that are expected at school start and that are favourable for a continuing successful inclusion.
The assessment of preschool environment and educational practices in the perspective of inclusion is still limited (Swedish School Inspectorate, 2016; Vallberg Roth, 2015). The marketization of the educational system has conjured up a need to show good results; therefore the evaluations of the educational practices may tend to show an embellished picture, instead of investigating areas in which development is necessary.
Play is an activity that is fundamental for children. Several studies have demonstrated that children with disabilities are likely to not participate and to not be involved in play and interaction as other children do. This means that these children risk missing out on a fundamental activity for their development, on proximal processes in interaction with peers. Play with peers provides an opportunity for increased well-being and contributes to the development of autonomy, self-esteem and social relationships, in the short term and in a life course perspective (Allodi Westling et al., 2015; Handisam, 2014). The significance of play for children may be at risk for being overlooked, because of the tendency towards an increased focus on formal learning in preschool, and, additionally for children with disabilities, because they may be object of training, rather than experience autonomy in authentic play with others.
The Inclusive Classroom Profile is used to assess the quality of daily inclusive classroom practices in early childhood settings.The concept of inclusive practices in the ICP vouches for the idea of individualization and adaptations within inclusive contexts (Soukakou, 2016).
The program Play Time/Social Time includes systematic play activities arranged for children with and without special needs. In PTST different kinds of social interaction skills are taught in play situations: sharing, persistence, requesting to share, play organizing, agreeing, and helping (Odom et al. 1997). Peer-mediated development and learning are approaches employed in the program.
The theoretical framework includes the bio-ecological development model (Bronfenbrenner, 1979) the concepts of scaffolding and peer-mediation (Bruner, 2002¸ Vygotskij, 1997) the framework of approaches to support play for children with disability (Barton, 2016) and the model of effective pedagogy in the early years (Sammons in Tashakkori et al. 2010).
The aim of this study was to test in several early educational contexts some approaches that have been developed for these purposes: the Inclusive Classroom Profile (ICP) (Soukakou, 2012 ) and Play Time/Social Time (Odom et al. 1997). The aim was also to collect evaluations of teachers and special educators in training about the relevance, efficacy, the social validity and usability of these approaches.
