Schools across the world face the necessity to deal with diversity. It is not only since the Salamanca Statement (1994), the formulation and ratification of the UN-CRPD (United Nations, 2006), or the publication of the Sustainable Development Goals (United Nations, 2015), that heterogeneity holds a key role in schools and classrooms and that it is perceived as one of the main challenges by teachers (Forsa 2020). In the last decades, the term Inclusive Education, therefore, became a major issue of educational discourses. Nevertheless, the overall target has not yet been reached which is why the topic is still exceptionally essential.

Following the demand for inclusive education and the need for learning opportunities that are suitable for each and every learner, inclusive diagnostics becomes increasingly relevant (Simon, 2015), as it promises some guidance in the otherwise rather uncertain, vague, and overwhelming field of inclusive education. By aiming at identifying the individuals’ skills and needs and necessary environmental adaptions, inclusive diagnostics may provide valuable findings for inclusive education (Simon, 2019). However, as of now, there is no consistent understanding of inclusive diagnostics. It is still uncertain how it should be designed and what concrete practical and organizational consequences can and should result from it (Simon, 2015). Furthermore, central aspects of inclusive education and diagnostic purposes are being blurred in current discourses and lead to a contradictory and not yet fully developed frame for inclusive diagnostics (ibid.). While in inclusive education, there is the demand to desist from categorization and stigmatization, the necessity of categories for the allocation of support and (financial) resources is widely recognized and one of the key ideas of diagnostic processes (Florian et al., 2006). This ambiguity is to be examined.

One eligible approach to do so is the utilization of the ICF-CY which has been developed, among others, for educational settings (World Health Organization, 2007). The ICF-CY is a classification system that extends the wider known ICD-11 that solely focuses on health conditions. By also considering individuals’ activities, participation, and their surrounding environmental factors (Florian et al., 2006) the ICF-CY offers outstanding opportunities for inclusive diagnostics. However, due to the complexity and little reference to application strategies, it is still rarely used in practice. In order to foster the implementation of inclusive education in school, diagnostic tools and procedures, as well as inclusive teaching practices that correspond to the ICF-CY, must be developed. This direct linkage of inclusive diagnostic tools (1) with subsequent recommendations for inclusive actions in practice (2) is a central and so far largely omitted element of inclusive education. In other words, the nexus of the question "what are the needs and resources that can be identified?" with the question "what improvements can be undertaken to provide adequate learning opportunities for the variety of learners?" must be tackled.

While the development of inclusive diagnostic tools lately experiences great alertness, the engagement in building such a systematic target perspective and connection point for inclusive diagnostics is still minimal. This PhD project aims at blending in with the described research gap between inclusive diagnostics (1) and inclusive teaching practices (2). Therefore, the project aims to engage with three sequential research questions:

1. What are the environmental (e.g., spatial accessibility) and individual (e.g., physical impairments) challenges teachers from different contexts perceive in their teaching
2. How do teachers overcome the perceived challenges in order to support the development of their students?
3. How may the pedagogical approaches and interventions of teachers from different contexts be systemized in a way that allows to easily link them to inclusive diagnostics and make them applicable across contexts?

Based on these questions, the research project pursues a bottom-up approach in the sense of a Grounded Theory Methodology. Following Charmaz (2006, p. 10) “Grounded theory serves as a way to learn about the worlds we study and a method for developing theories to understand them”. With regard to this research project, this means to develop a theory or a systematization that is based on teachers' experiences and knowledge and provides eligible options to incorporate the emerging theory into current inclusive educational discourses. Considering current globalization and refugee movements (e.g., Artiles/Dyson 2005; Fritzsche 2013) and the overarching aim of the project, a transcultural approach is prosecuted (Dinkelaker/Idel/Rabenstein 2011). Thus, inclusive teaching is understood as a cross-cultural challenge that teachers face. In accordance with the transcultural approach that is reflected within the methodological part, it also becomes evident within the specific methodical considerations. Regarding the data collection, a new and so far, barely used approach is being used: The method of Asynchronous Narrative Interviews. It derives from the area of qualitative interview methods but exploits the opportunities of digitalization. This is especially crucial as the importance of cross-cultural research is growing constantly. In addition, the use of digital technologies has massively increased during the last few years and especially during the Covid-19 pandemic (Lupton 2021). While this has not yet been truly reflected in qualitative and reconstructive research methods, this project aims at doing so. The method of Asynchronous Narrative Interviews proves promising, as it enables an easily accessible, spontaneous, anonymous, and comprehensive collection of qualitative data from teachers around the world. In the frame of this project, teachers are asked to provide insight into their subjective experiences of their professional practices by generating audio recordings. In order to encourage the teachers to share their experience in these audio recordings, a narrative impulse is given in the beginning. Following the asynchronous interview part, some concluding questions on socio-demographic data of the participants and about their working environment and conditions are collected in a semi-closed questionnaire.

As stated earlier, research on inclusive diagnostics can only support inclusive education if diagnostics are linked to eligible inclusive practices and approaches. In this way, students, teachers, and schools can benefit from inclusive diagnostics in practice, and it can be avoided that “inclusive” diagnostics leads to stigmatization and categorization of pupils. At the moment, providing adequate learning opportunities for the variety of learners in class does heavily rely on the involved teachers, schools, and the students’ parents. This does not only pose extreme pressure on the responsible actors but also leaves the students’ learning development to the motivation, expertise, and resources of the involved actors. Furthermore, structures, schools, teachers, and students are highly diverse and do not only differ across cultures and countries but also within smaller contexts. This necessitates a great variety of complex educational practices (Amor et al. 2018). While there are already multiple best-practice examples of schools, teachers, and approaches, a broader, systematic review of inclusive practices has not yet been done (e.g., Schallenberg-Diekmann 2017). The aim of this project thus is to develop a systematization of inclusive practices of teachers from different contexts. In light of the above-described current developments and research desiderates this is highly relevant and promises valuable research findings. By collecting rich qualitative data about inclusive teaching practices and by analyzing, structuring, and theorizing it within the framework of Grounded Theory Methodology, the project aims at generating a flexible and adaptable systematization that enriches the further development of theory and practice in inclusive education.

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