Inclusive education aims to address the diverse needs of the students in order to create conditions for their engagement in meaningful learning experiences and in rich social relationships. Learning communities have been identified for their potential to promoting it (Flecha, 2009). Learning Communities are based on the idea that the diverse members of the educational community have distinct knowledge and life experiences that are valid and can be mobilized for promoting learning and social cohesion. Accordingly, these schools actively seek to create conditions for involving students, teachers and non-teacher adults (e.g., family) in dialogic processes (Morlà-Folch et al., 2022). A key dimension of Learning Communities is that members of the educational community are willing to collaborate with each other and to develop egalitarian interactions, with a view to promoting the success of all students (Flecha, 2020). However, literature shows that developing collaborative processes in schools and with the educational community is not an easy process. Thus, the goal of this communication is to explore the potential of Learning Communities for developing collaboration processes as well as the challenges associated with it. The study focusses on schools working as Learning Communities and the analysis is based on data collected within the LC4Inclusion Project (Tinoca & Caetano, 2025), which involved an extensive study with 637 students and 154 teachers, and eight case studies involving students, teachers, non-teacher volunteers and principals. Participants reported students’ enjoyment with new ways of organizing classroom and learning processes and improved engagement with learning and academic performance; some teachers also mentioned the importance of a sense of community for promoting shared reflection and learning. Alongside the benefits, two main difficulties were noted. Some teachers showed resistance to open up their classrooms to the community and many do not recognize collaboration as a key dimension of inclusive education. In addition, family participation in classrooms’ action was often reduced (Freire et al., 2025). Results will be discussed in light of ways of organizing schools to foster collaborative processes and conditions that favour individual willingness to engage in egalitarian interactions with each other, as well as on joint reflection and learning.

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