Inclusive practice understood as a way of promoting all students’ learning and meaningful participation rather than providing something additional or special for some (Florian, 2015) requires various degrees of change in teachers’ beliefs, practices and relationships with others, including families, school staff and other professionals. Moreover, teachers’ practices are embedded in the institutional structures and cultures of their workplaces which partly determine interactions among actors, but can also be transformed to some extend through teachers’ collective agency (Pantić, 2015). However, such community-level transformation requires teachers’ involvement in the wider processes of inclusive school development and opportunities to negotiate and develop a common vision of required change among various actors (Ainscow, 2005). This paper considers the complexity of such change processes and presents a tool for teacher development that can be used to facilitate involvement of different actors in building a common understanding of inclusive practice while taking into account multiple perspectives and various degrees of tension between them. The paper draws on a theoretical framework that combines distinctive inclusive pedagogical approaches practice with theories of teacher agency (Pantić & Florian, 2015) to articulate the nature of teacher competence required for working purposefully with others to challenge the status quo. The paper further draws on the activity theory (Engestrӧm, 2001) to position teachers as participants in the (re-)definition of activity system rather than unproblematic implementers of roles with the system structures whose change is usually ascribed to mangers or other policy actors. The paper also presents an activity theory-based tool for teacher development (Hollenweger, Pantić & Florian, 2015) and illustrates its uses with the data from the Council of Europe project ‘Regional Support for Inclusive Education in South East Europe’. The project promoted a coherent vision of inclusive practice across communities of schools, teacher educators and policy makers in seven countries in South East Europe. 42 university, NGO and school-based teacher development programmes have been analysed against activity system components including: subjects, objects, outcomes, material artefacts and contexts in which programmes are delivered. The findings demonstrate how the tool can be helpful for gaging multiple understandings and enactments of inclusive principles, and identify tensions and contradictions as a way of building shared meanings, and plan a sequence of collective action in schools, or prepare future teachers for engagement with other actors within the system as essential aspect of teacher agency.

Ainscow, M. (2005). Developing inclusive education systems: what are the levers for change? Journal of Educational Change, 6(2), 109–124. Engeström, Y. (2001). Expansive Learning at Work: Toward an Activity Theoretical Reconceptualization’. Journal of Education and Work 14 (1): 133–56. Florian, L. (2015). Inclusive pedagogy: An alternative approach to difference and inclusion. In F. Kiuppis & R. S. Hausstätter (Eds.), Inclusive Education, twenty years after Salamanca (pp. 219–230). New York: Peter Lang. Hollenweger, J., Pantić N. & Florian, L. (2015). Tool to Upgrade Teacher Education Practices for Inclusive Education, Council of Europe, http://pjp-eu.coe.int/en/web/inclusive-education/documents Pantić, N. (2015). A model for study of teacher agency for social justice. Teachers and Teaching, 21(6), 759–778. Pantić, N., & Florian, L. (2015). Developing teachers as agents of inclusion and social justice. Education Inquiry, 6(3).