Background 

Internationally, there is an important policy drive to promote inclusive and quality education for all (Florian & Camedda, 2019).  Across the European Union, the European Council’s adopted 2018 Recommendation on Common values, Inclusive Education, and the European Dimension of Teaching underscores a commitment to promote and foster inclusive education in member states.   Inclusive education is viewed by the Commission as a way of contributing to the creation and maintenance of cohesive societies and responding to broader, global, challenges associated with, for example, migration and poverty. In particular, schools located in high poverty areas present challenges for teachers, and by extension for teacher educators, that go beyond a focus on standard educational provision with teachers taking on increasing responsibilities to help learners participate meaningfully in school (Naven, Sosu, Spencer, and Egan, 2019).

In Scotland, the National Framework for Inclusion (Scottish Teacher Education Committee, 2014) and the Scottish Attainment Challenge (Scottish Government, 2015) are two examples of current policy initiatives that underpin the promotion of inclusive education. Within this policy landscape teachers and teacher educators are viewed as important contributors in responding to increasingly diverse learner groups (OECD, 2012).   Yet, it is well known that many teachers feel unprepared to work with diverse learner groups (Cochran-Smith, Villegas, Abrams, Chavez-Moreno, Mills, and Stern, 2016). Preparing and supporting new teachers to work inclusively with increasingly diverse groups of learners, including those from low socio-economic backgrounds, is a dilemma facing teacher education in many countries worldwide. 

This study reports part of a larger project supported by the Scottish Government and the Scottish Council of Deans of Education to research teacher education pedagogies and induction strategies to better prepare early career teachers to make a positive difference for SIMD 1-40 communities.  In Scotland, areas of social and economic deprivation are identified using the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD) (Scottish Government, 2016). The study contributes to an expanding body of work on the Scottish inclusive practice project (Florian and Rouse, 2009), with a view to further understanding the preparation of new teachers to enact inclusive pedagogy. 

Theoretical framework

Inclusive pedagogy (Florian and Black-Hawkins, 2011) takes a socio-cultural perspective on learning and is concerned with achieving positive educational outcomes for all learners.  Underpinned by a commitment to address learner differences without marginalising or stigmatising learners, inclusive pedagogy involves teachers responding to individual differences by extending what is ordinarily available in the classroom to include all learners. Extending what is ordinarily available to everyone in the classroom builds on the work of Hart, Dixon, Drummond, and McIntyre (2004) which describes a way of being a teacher that rejects teaching practices where planned learning is differentiated for some based on preconceived judgements about learners’ abilities.   Inclusive pedagogy also requires practitioners to adopt a relational approach, working with others to remove “intersecting barriers to inclusion” (Pantić & Florian, 2015, p345). 

Enacting inclusive pedagogy requires teachers to develop what Black-Hawkins and Florian (2012) refer to as ‘craft’ knowledge, learned from experience, over time.  To date, research into teachers’ craft knowledge in and for inclusive pedagogy has tended to focus on experienced teachers.  In Scotland the Induction Year takes place after student teachers successfully complete the General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS) standard for provisional registration (initial teacher education- ITE) whereby they then work towards achieving the GTCS standard for full registration to become newly qualified teachers.  However, little is known about what Induction Year teachers in Scotland, focus on in relation to inclusive pedagogy.  This study aims to contribute recent and relevant data to surface on what is already there in terms of what the probationer teachers can do.  

This study adopts an exploratory multiple case study (Yin, 2018) to examine how probationer teachers learn to enact inclusive pedagogy in schools located in high poverty environments. Each probationer teacher served as their own case in terms of data collection. First-person reports were collected via semi-structured conversational interviews, reflective diaries and focus groups designed to gather fragments of the participants’ experiences of their efforts to enact inclusive pedagogy in high poverty school environments. All data were transcribed fully. The British Educational Research Association [BERA], 2018, guidelines for ethical practice were adhered to throughout. The criteria for locating and recruiting the seven research participants were guided by three principles (Cohen, Kahn, and Steeves, 2000): their experiences of place, here defined as schools located in areas of social and economic deprivation or in schools with significant proportions of pupils living in poverty, their experiences of events in time, here defined as graduates of the same ITE programme and participating in their Probationary Year, and ways of talking about their experiences, here defined as familiar with inclusive pedagogy. Four of the research participants were placed in two primary schools and three of the probationers were placed in the same secondary school. Each research participant was observed twice for approximately one hour on each occasion and all the observations were followed up with semi-structured interviews to elicit further information. All participants kept a reflective diary where they made an audio recording of their daily reflections for a period of two weeks. Each participant used the same reflective questions to structure their responses. Our data analysis was guided by our Research Question, What are the lived experiences of probationer teachers learning to enact inclusive pedagogy in schools located in high poverty environments? The analysis was divided into three phases: First, we conducted within-case analysis of each participant’s data to understand the individual context and nature of their experiences. Next, a mini-case summary for each participant was constructed. Pertinent themes informed by the three key assumptions underpinning the IPAA framework (Florian & Spratt, 2013) enabled us to surface and name examples of what the probationer teachers were able to do and to link these to the key assumptions to inclusive pedagogy. Finally, we conducted a cross-case analysis to identify any replicating patterns in terms of eliciting a better understanding of what the probationer teachers were able to do in relation to inclusive pedagogy.

These findings represent instances where all the 7 probationer teachers demonstrated they could enact elements of inclusive pedagogy. For IPAA Assumption 1: Difference is accounted for as an essential aspect of human development in any conceptualisation of learning, all probationer teachers were able to: i. Adopt teaching practices to include all children. For example, they made efforts to provide scaffolding; encouraged learners to verbalise their thinking; provided opportunities for experiential learning; and chunked lessons into smaller parts. ii. Created opportunities for learning so that all learners could participate in classroom life. For example, implementing the use of visual aids; concrete materials; targeted use of teacher time and whole class reading to support access to the planned learning. We did not find any evidence from all the 7 probationer teachers for the second IPAA assumption – which looks at teachers’ believing that they are qualified/capable of teaching all learners. For IPAA Assumption 3, all the 7 probationer teachers demonstrated that they were able to “continually develop creative new ways of working with others” through partnerships formed with other adults who work alongside them in the classroom. We found that the probationer teachers were able to collaborate at an intra-professional classroom level, for example, working with Pupil Support Assistants in their classrooms. While literature reports many teachers “feeling unprepared in working with diverse learner groups” (Cochran-Smith et al., 2016), our study provides a potential way for supporting new teachers to recognise they are making progress in developing inclusive practices that support the meaningful participation for all learners. By identifying and making visible what is possible for probationer teachers in terms of inclusive pedagogy we hope our findings will be of interest to others wishing to mobilise these assets to support others in further developing approaches to inclusive pedagogy in their settings.

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