Considering the importance of systemic and process-related change to realize inclusive education, this paper explores the practices that inform assessment processes and in how far these are guided by ideas of inclusion and inclusive education (e.g., Bourke & Mentis, 2014). This paper sheds light on the significance of pedagogical processes and stakeholders informing inclusive assessment in different cultural contexts. Data for this presentation stems from two corresponding projects that are engaged in promoting inclusive education based on inclusive assessment processes. However, both projects approach the issue from different contextual and methodological directions and thus raise diverse perspectives.

Based on focus group discussions and interviews with stakeholders such as teachers, students, and educational administrators from Austria, current challenges, needs, wishes, and requirements for assessment within an inclusive framework have been collected to develop an alternative assessment tool, the Inclusive Assessment Map (Erasmus+ project, I AM). In correspondence to that, a web-based application for inclusive assessment (Inclusive Assessment Map, 2022) has been developed and piloted in four countries. With the application, it is intended to assist practitioners to better recognise and support their students’ needs for suitable learning environments. Thus, it is targeted to stimulate a shift from person- and deficit-centred perspectives towards a classroom- and resource-oriented perspective in educational assessment (Europa Büro, 2021). The I AM project accordingly approaches the issue from the direction of inclusive assessment, steering towards inclusive education.

The second research context (the PhD project Inclusive Schooling Practices of Teachers Worldwide (InSpots)), however, proceeds the other way around and approaches the issue from inclusive education towards inclusive assessment. It explores teachers' solutions for designing inclusive learning environments in diverse contexts around the world. The InSpots project follows a transcultural and grounded theory-based research approach (Charmaz, 2017) in which asynchronous narrative audio-messages of teachers around the world are collected (Kleinlein, 2021). Based on this data, teachers' inclusive education approaches will be systematized alongside suitable and inclusive assessment categories. In line with Ainscow and Sandmill (2010, p. 411), the project is thus built on the belief “that education practitioners in resource-rich countries can learn some very useful lessons for their own practice if they engage with experience of efforts to promote inclusion in the South” - and the other way around. Even though cultural embeddedness must not be neglected or underestimated, the project aims to promote the understanding that it is possible and valuable “to learn in one country from practices and forms of provision developed elsewhere” (Artiles & Dyson, 2005, p. 42)

Following these remarks, the presentation particularly emphasises the perspectives of teachers that were collected within both projects. While the focus group discussions that were conducted with teachers in Vienna in the frame of the I AM project mainly concentrate on the multiple challenges that arise during (inclusive) assessment processes, the audio-messages that are collected in the InSpots project place teachers’ approaches to facilitate inclusive education in the centre of attention. Building on these insights into teachers' views on the inclusiveness of education and assessment in current national and regional practices, the presentation aims to explore opportunities for promoting inclusive assessment and education. After a brief introduction of the projects, selected interview data will be used to discuss recent findings, current dilemmas, and ongoing challenges at the outlined nexus (e.g., Simon, 2015, 2019). Among others, contested questions that will be tackled are: What is the aim of assessment in light of inclusive education? How can assessment in terms of inclusive education take place? Which actors and stakeholders should be involved in the assessment processes?

This submission examines the omission of the pedagogical in processes of inclusive assessment on the one side as well as the omission of appropriate assessment in processes of inclusive education on the other side (e.g., Norwich 2009, Schlee 2012). By including qualitative data from interviews and group discussions with teachers’ current debates on inclusive assessment and its interrelation with inclusive education and diversity will be discussed.

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