Inclusive Practice Project: Final Report
Inclusive Practice Project: Final Report - September 2012
Martyn Rouse and Lani Florian
Scottish schools face a period of unprecedented change and development. Although many things are done well in Scottish education, the long tail of underachievement and lack of participation for certain groups is a chronic problem. There are additional challenges associated with demographic changes in the population of schools associated with migration, disability and first language spoken. Schools also have to deal with changes in the curriculum, new approaches to assessment, new understandings of how children learn, new developments in inclusive pedagogy and demands for multi-agency working. All of these changes have implications for how teachers are prepared and supported. The task of initial teacher education is to prepare new teachers to enter a profession that accepts individual and collective responsibility for improving the learning and participation of all children, taking account that there will be differences between pupils. To this end, the Inclusive Practice Project (IPP) in the School of Education, University of Aberdeen has been developing and studying new approaches to training teachers to ensure that they:
• have a greater awareness and understanding of the educational and social problems/issues that can affect children’s learning; and
• have developed strategies they can use to support and deal with such difficulties.
The Aberdeen approach is based on a concept of inclusive pedagogy which recognises that with appropriate support, class teachers can accept with confidence, the responsibility for teaching all children in inclusive classrooms. The inclusive pedagogical approach does not reject the notion of specialist knowledge about additional needs and why some pupils have difficulties in learning, but focuses on how to make use of this knowledge in ways that facilitate the learning and participation of everyone. At the heart of this process is the development of positive relationships with optimistic views about learners.
As a research and development project, the IPP focused on embedding issues of inclusion from the outset in initial teacher education for primary and secondary student teachers. Based on socio-cultural understanding of learning, the inclusive pedagogical approach promotes a view of human difference as an aspect of every person, rather than something that characterises or differentiates some learners from others. The approach was developed from studies of the craft knowledge of experienced teachers committed to inclusive practice in mainstream schools.
