Italy has long established mainstream schooling as the normative setting for learners with disabilities. Within the broader European landscape of inclusive education, it represents one of the earliest and most structurally integrated systems following processes of deinstitutionalisation and rights-based reform. Yet research continues to document a persistent gap between structural inclusion and the transformation of everyday teaching and learning practices (Dell’Anna et al., 2023). The presence of students with disabilities in mainstream settings does not automatically translate into shared responsibility, collaborative redesign of pedagogy, or collective engagement with barriers to participation.

A distinctive feature of the Italian system is the structural co-presence of subject teachers and support teachers within the same classroom. This arrangement potentially creates favourable conditions for inclusive practice. However, empirical studies suggest that co-teaching frequently defaults to parallel work or delegated support, with responsibility for inclusion often implicitly shifted towards support teachers (Ciletti et al., 2025). As a result, structural co-presence risks remaining an organisational arrangement rather than becoming a transformative pedagogical resource.

At a European level, inclusive education is increasingly framed not only as access to mainstream schooling but as participation, agency and contextual transformation. The CRPD positions persons with disabilities at the centre of decisions concerning their life projects and the environments they inhabit. Translating this principle into school contexts implies moving beyond models in which support is designed for students towards approaches in which students actively contribute to identifying barriers and reshaping learning environments. Such a shift foregrounds agency not as an individual trait, but as a relational and collective process enacted within institutional structures.

Within this framework, student voice is understood as a political and epistemic practice rather than a mere consultative tool (Fielding, 2004; Cook-Sather, 2007). However, participation practices often privilege speech-centric forms of expression, limiting the involvement of students with complex communicative repertoires (Lewis-Dagnell et al., 2023). Expanding participation therefore requires multimodal approaches capable of recognising voice as relational, embodied and contextually shaped (Gonzalez et al., 2017).

This study responds to these tensions by recontextualising Inclusive Inquiry (Messiou, 2014) within the Italian co-teaching model. Originally developed as a collaborative action research approach that positions students as researchers of their own learning environments, Inclusive Inquiry offers structured cycles of observation, evidence gathering and pedagogical redesign. In this project, the framework is adapted to operate within structurally mandated co-teaching contexts, explicitly foregrounding joint planning between subject and support teachers and embedding multimodal participatory strategies that enable all students—including those communicating predominantly or entirely non-verbally—to participate as co-researchers.

The study addresses the following research questions:

1. How can Inclusive Inquiry be recontextualised within the Italian co-teaching model to transform structural co-presence into intentional collaborative practice?
   

2. How do multimodal participatory strategies enable students, including those communicating predominantly or entirely non-verbally, to act as co-researchers in processes of pedagogical redesign?
   

3. How does engaging in collaborative inquiry reshape teachers’ professional learning and shared responsibility for inclusion?
   

By situating Inclusive Inquiry within a structurally inclusive European system, the study contributes to ongoing debates about how rights-based frameworks can be translated into everyday pedagogical practice. It seeks to illuminate how collaborative inquiry may function as a mechanism for redistributing epistemic authority and transforming co-teaching from an organisational arrangement into a site of collective agency and professional learning.

This study adopts a collaborative action research design informed by Inclusive Inquiry (Messiou, 2014) and situated within a single Grade 11 vocational secondary classroom in Northern Italy. The research engages four subject–support teacher dyads (Italian, Mathematics, English and Cooking) working within a structurally mandated co-teaching model. Two inquiry groups are formed, each including six students identified by teachers as 'hand to reach' in them lessons. Among them are students communicating predominantly or entirely non-verbally. The research unfolds through iterative cycles of joint planning, classroom observation, evidence gathering and collective redesign. At the beginning of the process, students and teachers are introduced to inquiry principles and to multimodal tools designed to facilitate participation across diverse communicative repertoires. These include drawing, photography, short video narratives and small-scale spatial modelling of classroom and laboratory layouts, through which participants represent positioning, interaction patterns and perceived barriers. Structured observation templates and guided reflection protocols support systematic evidence collection. Data sources include field notes from classroom observations, audio-recorded co-planning meetings, student focus groups, semi-structured interviews with teachers, and student-generated multimodal artefacts (e.g. visual representations, annotated images, spatial models). The researcher acts as facilitator of the inquiry process while maintaining a reflexive stance, documenting positionality and decision-making through analytic memos. Data analysis follows a reflexive thematic approach across inquiry cycles. Verbal data (interviews, discussions) and visual–spatial artefacts are analysed iteratively to identify patterns related to participation, redistribution of responsibility and transformations in co-teaching practice. Multimodal materials are interpreted in relation to the contexts in which they were produced, acknowledging their relational and embodied dimensions. Emerging interpretations are shared with participants during collective reflection sessions to support dialogic validation and ongoing refinement of pedagogical strategies. Ethical approval was granted by the University of Turin. Informed consent procedures were differentiated and treated as ongoing, particularly in relation to students communicating non-verbally, whose assent was monitored through multimodal indicators and relational attunement. The research design thus integrates methodological rigour with accessibility and rights-based participation principles.

Although data collection is ongoing and will end in May 2026, the study is expected to generate insights into how structurally inclusive systems can be reconfigured through collaborative inquiry processes. By recontextualising Inclusive Inquiry within the Italian co-teaching model, the research aims to illuminate the conditions under which structural co-presence can evolve into intentional collaborative practice rather than delegated support. First, the study is expected to show how multimodal participatory strategies can broaden the epistemic space of inquiry, enabling students—particularly those communicating non-verbally—to contribute meaningfully to the identification of barriers and the redesign of classroom practices. In doing so, it may offer methodological insights into how voice can be enacted beyond speech-centric paradigms, contributing to debates on participation within European inclusive education research. Second, the project is likely to highlight shifts in teachers’ professional learning and shared responsibility. By engaging in structured cycles of observation and redesign, teachers may move from implicit or individualised approaches to more collective, context-oriented understandings of inclusion. This has implications for how co-teaching is conceptualised across European systems where collaborative models are increasingly promoted but unevenly enacted. Finally, the study contributes to ongoing discussions about how rights-based frameworks, particularly those grounded in the CRPD, can be translated into everyday pedagogical practice. Rather than treating inclusion as a static organisational achievement, the findings are expected to conceptualise it as a dynamic, negotiated process situated within relational and professional practices. In this sense, the project seeks to bridge structural policy commitments and the micro-level enactment of inclusive education across European contexts.

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