Inclusive pedagogy in practice: the point of view of teachers

In response to the growing diversity in learner population many researchers, teacher educators and policy makers have been concentrating their efforts on the need to develop teachers' competence in inclusive education. Most research efforts and policy initiatives are moving along the line of elaborating and proposing a range of inclusive pedagogical strategies relying on offering students a wealth of opportunities for active involvement, collaborative and personalised learning. This study, instead, is based on the assumption that teachers are professionals who, through many years of practice, have developed effective strategies to cope with learners' diversity, even if sometimes their competence is "tacit" and needs to be elicited. Hence, we acknowledged them the role of experts and set out to investigate which inclusive strategies they privilege. The aim of the study is to answer the following research question: "what kind of strategic principles do teachers consider important for designing and running inclusive teaching?" To this end, we adopted the Nominal Group Technique (NGT), a participator approach to elicit the competence of a panel of informants and support consensus building. The panel involved in the study consisted of 18 in-service teachers of primary and lower secondary schools, from Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, and Italy. They were asked to focus on inclusion needs originated by socio-cultural and economic disadvantage, and produce "recommendations for a colleague on how to design and implement inclusive learning activities". The NGT was conducted by 4 researchers moderating the work of three panels of informants of 5, 6, and 7 members. Participants produced 85 recommendations providing some interesting insights about teachers' beliefs on inclusive pedagogy. The majority of their recommendations were in line with those that can be extracted from research literature, stressing for example the importance of creating mixed-skill level teams for group work, or being highly aware of individual needs. However, some recommendations contrasted with academic recommendations. For example, one aspect that usually appears in literature but was not mentioned by teachers is the importance of opening the class to the local and global context. On the other hand, not only did teachers disregard the idea of addressing inclusive content, but they even rated highly the recommendation that all activities should be in line with the curriculum. These findings should be confirmed through more extensive investigation and confronted with the beliefs of other stakeholders, such as students. However, should they be confirmed, they can inform the way teacher professional development can be carried out in the future.