Quality Development of Inclusive and Equitable Education on School Level

Introduction to Topic

In this chapter, we focus on the quality development of equitable and inclusive education on the level of single educational institutions, like a school or a kindergarten. In an attempt to develop a theoretical-practical reflection useful for future teachers, we want to emphasise how the commitment to inclusion and equity should not only concern specific categories, but all students. Furthermore, we see it as a systemic issue: the individual work done by teachers and students in their own classroom needs to be accompanied with the reflection and improvement of school cultures and organisational practices so that the quality development of inclusive and equitable education becomes structural and is understood as a recursive circle.

After having clarified on a theoretical-conceptual level what we mean by quality development of inclusive and equitable education, we focus on processes that can be activated. The emphasis is on the participation of all actors, since equity and inclusion are not only to be understood as aims, but also as approaches that foster the various improvement paths. In doing so, the focus on the students’ contribution is crucial: inclusion-development cannot exclude the school’s main protagonists. This can be challenging within the asymmetric relationship between adults and children and youth at school. Also, for that reason, the quality development of inclusive and equitable education is a process that has never been completed once and for all, and which urges us to imagine virtuous paths to be co-designed for a democratic education.

Key aspects

Quality of Inclusive and Equitable Education: a definition and a frame of reference

With the combined use of the terms inclusion and equity we intend to refer, as other authors also do (Ainscow, 2020; Florian, 2017), to a broad understanding of inclusion as described in the Sustainability Development Goal 4 of the UNESCO Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development. As elaborated in the “Education 2030 Framework for action” (2015) the Goal 4 lays inclusion and equity as the foundations for high quality in education and stresses that all forms of exclusion, marginalisation, discrimination and inequalities in access, participation and learning need to be addressed. This implies the development of democratic educational communities committed to offering to all learner’s high quality participation opportunities and differs from narrow conceptualisations of inclusion focusing on the specific social and academic needs of children with so-called Special Educational Needs (SEN) in mainstream settings (Göransson & Nilholm, 2014).

We understand inclusive and equitable education as a process that is continuously oriented to increase presence, learning progress and participation (Ainscow, 2020) of all learners, with a specific attention to those that experience more barriers in the actual school system and are therefore more at risk of exclusion, underachievement or marginalisation. In doing so, we refer to the idea of social justice in education that calls for a constant commitment to ensure that everyone receives an excellent education that supports the development of the capabilities that are indispensable to lead a fulfilling life and exercise citizenship.

The contribution of post-colonial studies (Aman, 2017; Ashcroft et al, 2013; Young, 2020) and intersectional theory (Crenshaw, 2017; Hill Collins, 2019) allow us to emphasise the need to decentralise our gaze and to consider the multiple variables that come into play in people’s educational and life paths: the commitment to equity only becomes concrete if we do not give in to compensatory logics whereby there is a norm to strive for and if quality standards are contextualised and not given once and for all (Kyriakides et al., 2020).

The development of inclusive and equitable education is complex and requires, this is our view, a systemic understanding (Ainscow, 2005; Kinsella & Senior, 2008). This understanding implies that change towards inclusion and equity in schools cannot be simplified as rules, action plans, single activities expected to impact linearly on all students’ learning and participation. Rather, change requires “social learning processes within a given workplace that influence people’s actions and, indeed, the thinking that informs these actions” (Ainscow, 2005: 113). Within a school these processes, as suggested in Bronfenbrenner’s ecological understanding of organisations (1979), needs to be activated at several levels: the individual level of teachers and other professionals, the team level of classes or other collegial working groups, the whole school level, up to the level of the school within the networks of its community. Furthermore, even if this moves beyond the intentions of this chapter, the single school institution needs to be recognised as part of a school system and of a society, that set principles and regulations that can influence – sustain or hinder – the quality development. Summing up, the systemic understanding of inclusive development warns of failure, there is a risk of over-simplified representations of the process and points out the importance of considering several levels of the educational system and their interactions.

For the definition of quality towards which development processes head to, we refer to the Index for Inclusion (Booth & Ainscow, 2011). The tool, explicitly designed for the development of inclusive schools, was firstly published in 2000 and then successfully translated and adapted into more than 30 languages. It shares the broad and systemic understanding of inclusion and equity in education outlined above and declines it in a set of indicators that describe how inclusive and equitable education looks in everyday life in schools. Indicators are organised on three main dimensions:

1. the dimension of inclusive cultures, with indicators related to values and relationships in the school;
2. the dimension of inclusive policies, that comprehends indicators addressing organisational aspects of school;
3. the dimension of inclusive practices, where indicators on the way learning and teaching is organised are collected.

Processes that sustain the quality development of inclusive and equitable education: reflection, research, and evaluation in a participatory pathway

The international community recalls the importance of quality education and training to improve the living conditions of individuals, communities, and societies. The quality development of inclusive and equitable education should be promoted by educational policies and supported by ethical values within schools, school leadership, and teachers’ teaching practices. The perspective of inclusive and equitable education, in its broadest sense as a perspective of valuing the differences of each element (cultural, individual, contextual), involved in the educational and social process emphasises shared inclusive values. In other words, the prerequisite for being able to speak of processes that support an inclusive and equitable education is the commitment to certain pedagogical principles and values that are ethically coherent with the idea of inclusion and equity. Therefore, authentic attempts to foster agreement around these common values are necessary for the development of high-quality, inclusive, and equitable education. This can be reached with an open and constructive dialogue among all parties involved in the educational process, including teachers, students, families, and school administrators.

A framework that can help in the promotion of an inclusive dialogue on values within a school is provided by the Index for Inclusion (Booth & Ainscow, 2011), already introduced above. The work puts forward a set of inclusive values: equity, rights, participation, community, respect for diversity, sustainability, non-violence, trust, compassion, honesty, courage, joy, love, hope, optimism, and beauty. They can inspire and invite to critically reflect on inclusive values and tailor them to their own educational context.  In this way, the Index for Inclusion turns into a useful instrument for enabling a value-based school development where every student can experience a sense of acceptance, worth, and agency in their own education.

Reflective and research-oriented processes

The value system described in the Index requires actors in the educational context at all levels to take an approach oriented toward reflection and research for solutions by participatory change. Proceeding in the exploration of the processes that support the quality development of inclusive and equitable education highlights the importance of cultivating an overarching reflective attitude within school communities. Reflective practice is a concept that should be introduced into the operational dimension of the school as it is very important for its improvement (Maksimović & Osmanović, 2018). This means that all actors in the educational context spend time planning and reflecting on what they want to achieve, what the advantages and disadvantages are, what works well, and what needs to be changed and improved. Besides the fact that reflective practice influences the introduction of positive changes in educational practice, it is also a process for developing the quality of inclusive and equitable education. Reflective practice guides the work of the actors in the educational context toward finding the positive changes they want to produce in planning actions for the quality development of inclusive and equitable education (Ainscow, 2005).

Consequently, the reflective process, both during the planning and during the work itself, is directly connected with the pedagogical research process of concrete actions to remove the obstacles that hinder the development of inclusive and equitable education. The research process is not linear as developing the quality of inclusive and equitable education is always something more complex and challenging because each educational institution has its own specific needs and characteristics, its own unique resources and capacities.

Self-Evaluation in the quality development process

Reflective and research-oriented development usually contains an evaluation phase, within schools taking a look at the “state of the art.” It is an unavoidable step that needs to be taken for monitoring the achievement of the goals identified during the reflection and research processes. Basically, evaluation, if understood with a formative function, should be oriented towards a quality development of inclusive and equitable education. Its aim is not to produce rankings or to force competition between classes or teachers. School leaders have a great responsibility to lead the evaluation processes and results in a formative way.

Evaluation can have different starting points. ”Concepts for self-evaluation are often combined with external evaluation as a new task for local and regional school authorities” (Buhren in Nevo, 2002: 262). Self-evaluation at school level can be mandatory or not for schools, but usually schools have a large range of choices about the topics to be evaluated, instruments and methodological approaches. According to MacBeath (1999) self-evaluation of schools should be led by a framework based on criteria referring to the essential purposes of education, which involves all parties involved by creating an inclusive climate, which provides starting points and guidelines without being prescriptive and which is flexible enough to use in a variety of contents and ways. In order to develop the quality of a single school or kindergarten, the reference to an inclusive focused framework, such as the Index for Inclusion, is needed. The methodological approach can be quantitative, qualitative or mixed, where the indicators become items for questionnaires or the values objects for discussions within the school community. Tannenbergerovà et al. describes useful formulations of indicators (Tannenbergerovà et al., 2018) based even on the Index for Inclusion and gives a rich overview of selected studies about quantitative and qualitative tools – mainly questionnaires – for evaluating school quality. The choice of the instruments mainly depends on the skills of the teachers in-charge (of course the school can also appoint evaluation experts from outside to develop the evaluation design and as support for the more technical part) or even on the dimension and complexity of the topic that should be evaluated (Simons in Nevo, 2002). An important precondition for a successful evaluation is to conduct the process following a structure like this (Kempfert & Rolff, 2018; Pfeil & Müller, 2020; Stockmann, 2007):

1. Focus on the topic
2. Definition of the target group
3. Choice of the instruments
4. Data collection
5. Evaluation of the collected data
6. Data presentation to the school community
7. Interpretation of data in a cooperative approach
8. Conclusion and derivation of changing measures
9. Evaluation of the applied measures after a while

Participation: the key element of inclusive and equitable quality development

Participation is a key element of democratic and inclusive practice. All forms of participation share an important pedagogical relevance because they are important tools for active citizenship education in a heterogeneous society (Sant, 2019).

For this reason, it is important to reflect on a number of issues, such as the function of participation in sustainable development and the place of schools in educating for participation and thus for democracy (Lysgaard & Simovska, 2015).

The presented reflections highlight that an important characteristic of participation forms and sharing processes is the relevance of the school sphere as a context for participatory action.

The school context is a sphere/place of action for effective qualitative change through participatory practices in which all school actors are “everyday makers” (Bang, 2005).

At the basis of this engagement is the reconstitution of collective identity based on the project of change towards qualitative improvement.

In order to build participatory development, it is necessary to have cultural resources and practices oriented towards constructive interaction in the sign of a reciprocal, non-hierarchical, open-to-listening, conflict-transforming confrontation. In general, a participatory development process is based on an approach of recognition, negotiation and cooperation in which interests and not positions are focused on (De Jong et al., 2019). In a participatory development process, an exploratory mode prevails in order to make everyone open to express their thoughts in order to include the many different points of view involved (Forester, 1999) and to build an active trust constantly sustained in a process of openness to the other, reciprocity and reflexivity (Giddens, 1994).

At the heart of the processes for seeking changes in school practice is the development of a common language and sharing values where members of the community can talk to each other about their practice and experience (Ainscow et al., 2013) in an exchange that, as discussed below, starts at the class level/group level (i.e., in smaller groups,  class teams, multi-professional teams, subject working groups) and goes all the way up to broad participatory practices such as at school/organisation level due to the presence of school leaders who are committed to inclusive values and a leadership style that encourages a range of teachers to participate in leadership functions (Ainscow et al., 2013).

Inclusion is a process, an ongoing search for new and better ways to respond to diversity by experiencing how to live with and learn from differences (UNESCO, 2005).

In addition to actively involving teachers, the participatory process encourages critical reflection and a redesign of practices by all actors in the school community. This process begins with a rethinking of specific collegial moments in everyday life (such as various working groups, parents’ meetings, student assemblies, and school councils), from which a series of methodological and pedagogical focus points arise. The goal is to improve participation that is based on the quality of relationships and mutual listening while also valuing the contributions of each member of the school community (Hugo Suárez, 2019).

In this way, the participatory process becomes a tool for the continuous improvement of the school institution, fostering the well-being and growth of all.

Students who actively participate in decisions affecting school life may feel more responsible and involved in their own learning process, which can lead to increased motivation, academic performance, and a sense of belonging to the school. Parents can also contribute significantly to the school by sharing their experiences and knowledge, as well as actively participating in decision-making processes as members of collegial bodies. Of course, administrative, technical, and auxiliary staff play an important role in the school’s day-to-day operations; their input into decision-making can help improve the efficiency and effectiveness of school services. Finally, school leaders are responsible for creating an inclusive and participatory school environment by encouraging dialogue among the various actors in the school community and promoting participatory initiatives.

These considerations, apparently trivial but often implicit and responsible for dysfunctional communication and relationships, could be translated into specific attention aimed at building an effective participatory process at the level of the entire school community. These actions could concretely include:

– care in the preparation of events, focusing not only on cognitive content but also on social, communicative, and affective dimensions.

– the ability to identify the most appropriate actions to materially and operationally translate intentions, values, and ideas.

– the ability to show what is done from a pedagogical point of view through documentation and the conscious use of communicative mediators.

– the ability to strategically solicit the motivation to participate in all actors.

The success of this perspective necessarily passes through the continuum in the involvement of all members of the community. In reflection and in the search for attitudes and practices aimed at improvement in the awareness for all that they are part of the change being sought.

The teacher’s role in quality development of inclusive and equitable education

Teachers and other professionals working with learners in educational institutions such as kindergartens and schools are in the key-role of modelling attitudes related to inclusive and equitable education in everyday life in their classrooms. The closer the contact and relationship and the longer the time spent together, the stronger is the impact on learners in experiencing inclusion and equity or the opposite of them.

Coherently with a systemic understanding of education institutions, the teacher’s role for improving inclusive and equitable education needs to be considered on more levels (Bernstein et al., 2010). At the individual level it is important for teachers to develop awareness about their own attitudes, their guiding values, their beliefs and even their struggles related to diversity, but also to be open for developing personal competencies and skills. Referring to the Profile for Inclusive Teacher Professional Learning (European Agency for Special Needs and Inclusive Education, 2022), the central areas of competencies can be described in: valuing learner diversity, supporting all learners, working with others, personal and collaborative professional development, support all learners’ well-being and listen to learners’ voices.

In a more personal and self-reflecting approach, Kricke and Reich suggest going through a question-checklist (see attachment at the end of the chapter), trying to examine the own strengths and weaknesses for working in an inclusive setting (Kricke& Reich, 2015: 206-207).

The development of new skills and the awareness of “blind spots” in their own daily practice need a permanent reflection on the effects of their actions for quality of inclusive and equitable education. At the same time, the active personal participation in development and evaluation processes at school level is the task of every single teacher.

At the collegial relationship level/group level teachers that work cooperatively in smaller groups: i.e., class teams, multiprofessional teams, subject working groups, topic-oriented working groups or professional learning communities are addressed. At this level, it is essential that all teachers and other professionals go into dialogue valuing professional and personal diversity and using it to develop reflective and development practices. A target-oriented cooperation needs some basic requirements, such as reciprocal trust, openness to the unusual, the joy of experimenting, communication skills and high commitment (Kricke & Reich, 2015). To improve the quality of inclusive and equitable teaching, formats where the daily work can be reflected, analysed and where new solutions can be developed together through a research approach, can support and develop the teaching quality (Bernstein et al., 2010).

As far as the school/organisation level is concerned, there is a need to engage in a preliminary reflection on the role of governance and the most suitable models with respect to quality development of equitable and inclusive education. School governance is called upon to formulate educational policies at school level that are clearly oriented towards equity and inclusion (Karlsson et al., 2019; Ward et al., 2015). Adopting a distributed leadership facilitates these processes (Hickey et al., 2022; Mincu, 2022): the school leader is no longer a “one individual in charge,” but responsibility is shared with the school community, who formulate proposals combining the level of classroom life with the institutional dimension of schools. This commitment takes on ethical contours (Peters, 2015) since it involves constructing a vision that is then operationalised and in which terms such as inclusion, equity, social justice are not neutral, but take on a precise and situated meaning. Associating distributed leadership with the construct of ethical leadership (Brown et al., 2005) can be useful in highlighting the need for a shared commitment to the common good (De Hoog & Den Hartog, 2009) that takes into account everyone’s personal characteristics, the relational nature of educational processes and the impact that actions and policies can generate. It is precisely the ethical bent of the distributed leadership model that emphasises the participatory nature of quality development processes for inclusive and equitable education (Ahmad et al., 2017; Liu & Hin, 2023): only with the contribution of all is it possible to have systemic improvements.

According to the leadership model outlined here, middle management is of crucial importance. To keep the quality development process alive and permanent, as “into the on-going structure of the school” (Simons in Nevo, 2002: 25), it is crucial to designate teachers or teacher groups at the middle-management level and to delegate the tasks within the school structure. Specific working groups are given the formal role to constantly monitor the quality of inclusive and equitable education (Nevo, 2002). The task is to initiate, accompany and support a school-internal process of development, maybe starting with a (self-evaluation process focused on specific indicators), i.e., from the Index for Inclusion, or even starting with a new school program (see above under “evaluation”). Although the main responsibility for activating and nourishing the process lays on the designated teachers or groups of teachers, the whole school community is in charge to cooperate actively in promoting and developing the quality: Every piece counts.

Students’ participation in the quality development of inclusive and equitable education

We see students’ participation as a key lever for the development of inclusive and equitable education. If inclusion defines the process of improving all learners’ participation opportunities, then listening to children’s and youth’s voices becomes a concrete inclusive act (Messiou, 2019). The idea is neither new nor original: many studies refer to such examples (Sandoval & Messiou, 2022). At their basis there is the idea of schools as communities where teachers, students and other partners collaborate in a democratic manner in order to constantly improve the quality of their own school. This requires a new definition of roles, both for students and for teachers (Fielding, 2011) as the adults’ role strongly influences the actual impact of students’ participation.

As a premise to it, having in mind the way power fosters relationships in most schools in western countries, it is important to recognise consciously that the teacher-student relationship is asymmetric. This means that in order to have “student voice” meaningfully involved in development processes teachers’ validation and authorisation is required for students to express freely their opinion on the different aspects of school lives and to have the power to actively make proposals for changes that can improve the quality of their school experience (Fletscher, 2005; Robinson & Taylor, 2013). This can only happen if teachers and other professionals in school create a space for students’ participation and share the power they have. This can happen in several ways, with students being sources of data, active respondents, co-researchers or researchers (Fielding, 2001).

The fact that it is an adults’ responsibility to offer opportunities for participation also implies some risks. As it was clearly described in the popular ladder of children’s participation by Hart (1992), adults’ power can also lead to children’s and youth’s voices to be manipulated or to be used in a “decorative” manner, making their presence visible, but not authentically considered as potential levers for change and development or only listening to what already meets the adults’ expectations.

In this chapter, we argue that learners’ genuine participation can sustain quality development of inclusive and equitable education from at least two points of view. As a first step, students can give feedback on learning and teaching processes. If evaluation is seen with a formative function, then data collected through evaluation are important in order to understand what works and what does not in learning and teaching. Students can develop learning strategies on the basis of this reflective process, but this is also important for developing the quality of teaching. If students self-evaluate the reached skills and competences and to evaluate the way teaching and learning was organised, they have some evidence on the fact that their offer is (or not) reaching all the students. Interesting examples of this form of participation have been collected in the Students’ Voices Toolkit of the three-year project (2017-2020) funded by the European Union ‘Reaching the hard to reach: inclusive responses to diversity through child-teacher dialogue’ (https://reachingthehardtoreach.eu/pupil-voice-tool-kit/).

Second, students can also become co-researchers for quality development processes. As part of being directly involved in evaluation processes, they can take an active role in the planning of change, working together with adults in selecting development priorities and designing strategies to reach them. A recent research review (Sandoval & Messiou, 2022), identified by means of the analysis of 28 studies highlights a list of steps that are typical for development processes that employ student researchers approaches:

• 1) Initially, learner-centred activities activate and sustain all student’s interest for school development.
• 2) Usually on a voluntary basis, but often also on the basis of shared criteria, some students decide to invest more in school development becoming co-researchers.
• 3) Student-researchers are trained.
• 4) Student-researchers collect data in order to evaluate/reflect on the school actual situation, usually having other students as targets.
• 5) Findings are shared within the whole school community.
• 6) Student researchers are involved together with adults in the process of change planning and implementation.
• 7) In very few studies, students are also involved in the phase dissemination of the research experience.

A good example of an approach that strongly supports the role of students as co-researchers, is the Inclusive Inquiry (Messiou & Ainscow, 2020). The approach promotes the creation of working groups composed both of students and of teachers for the development of high quality inclusive and equitable lessons. The group plans a lesson, a teacher teaches it while the rest of the group (students and teachers together) observe. After the lesson, the same group reflects on what went well and on what can be improved in the lesson. Together, the group aims at planning lessons that succeed in reaching all students. Teachers’ and students’ perspectives go into dialogue trying to identify barriers for learning and to overcome them.

Thinking systemically: other actors involved in the quality development process of inclusive and equitable education

Teachers and students certainly play a crucial role in the quality development of inclusive and equitable education, but it is essential to refer to other actors involved in this process, not least because they enter into dialogue with students and teachers and make their own contribution to this improvement process. This attention is indispensable precisely because of the systemic nature of inclusive and equitable development (Roszak, 2009; Scheerens et al., 2003), as we mentioned at the beginning of this chapter: a culture of inclusion and equity can only be built through participatory processes that bring different visions into dialogue and find a common synthesis.

Within the school, school leaders play a crucial role in orchestrating participatory processes of quality development of inclusive and equitable education in which equity and inclusion are not only aims but also methods of action (Cambron-McCabe & McCarthy, 2005; Jean-Marie et al., 2009). As we said before, distributed leadership needs to be combined with elements of ethical and inclusive leadership (Kuknor & Bhattacharya, 2022; Ryan, 2006; 2007; Thompson & Matkin, 2020): the participation of all members of the school community needs to be co-constructed and planned day by day.

Parents can also be key actors in the quality development of inclusive and equitable education (Anderson & Minke, 2007). They are indirectly involved in their children’s school experience and thus can provide important feedback on the level of equity and inclusiveness of schools (Stelmach, 2016). However, it is necessary to take into account the different socio-economic and socio-cultural backgrounds that may influence beliefs and values with respect to these issues (Dusi, 2012; Lawson, 2003): here again, the bringing together of different worldviews is preparatory to the co-construction of a common imaginary that allows everyone to identify with a constant virtuous path for improvement. They are not simple processes: conflict is always lurking, as well as the presence of perspectives that are difficult to reconcile. The challenge of educational co-responsibility, also on an institutional level, is to place students at the centre by enhancing the uniqueness of each one (Daniel, 2011; Yull et al., 2014): families and education professionals have complementary but well-defined tasks, so there must be no reciprocal encroachment.

In a systemic logic, also the contribution of other partners, such as municipalities, local school authorities, health system, social services and counselling services are crucial (Coombs et al., 2013; Gidley et al., 2010; Valeo, 2008). Aspects such as the accessibility of infrastructures and the removal of architectural barriers, the drafting of clear guidelines and regulations that define inclusion not as something aimed only at specific diversities but at everyone’s uniqueness, the planning of structural funding to support schools and out-of-school activities in the planning of initiatives with social impact, counselling support for teachers, students, families and parents, the development of protocols and evaluation tools require the cooperation of the school with other institutions in the local community. Schools cannot manage all these aspects alone, they must become objects of shared, collaborative and participatory planning instead (Bottrell & Goodwin, 2011; Feldman & Khademian, 2007). Particularly interesting in this area of cooperation is also networking with other schools that makes it possible to work in synergy on the co-creation of inclusive contexts even beyond the strictly school environment, in addition to fostering the exchange of virtuous practices on an institutional and classroom life level (Wohlstetter et al., 2003).

Furthermore, universities can play an important role in supporting schools in virtuous paths of improvement in terms of equity and inclusion. They can give schools methodological support, do research with them and not on them (Burton & Greher, 2007; Griffiths, 1998; Walsh & Backe, 2013): methods belonging to the action-research family (Baum et al., 2006; Catelli et al., 2000) are forms of educational research that on the one hand enable knowledge advancement and on the other hand make teachers and professionals protagonists of a sustainable improvement development process (Kyza et al., 2022), in a recursiveness between theory and practice that contributes to the improvement of school life in organisational terms and in terms of students’ daily experience (Hine & Lavery, 2014; Mertler, 2019). The synergy between school and university through change-oriented research paths makes it possible to systematise innovations and improvements without them being lost over time (Ainscow et al., 2004; Calhoun, 2002). The process-oriented and participatory nature of these paths supports the professional development of teachers and managers and the transformation of school culture in a bottom-up logic.

Concluding, the role of teachers as members of a democratic school community has been discussed at several levels. Some changes at higher level require a political commitment outside school in order to be in dialogue with policymakers so that education policies are co-constructed with those who live schools on a daily basis (Whorton, 2017). Furthermore, in connection with the need to enhance the students’ voice emphasised in the previous section, it would be useful for their perspective to carry political weight as well (Brooks et al., 2020).

Local contexts

Attachment: Checklist for Self-Evaluation for Inclusive Teachers

Every teacher in inclusive settings should also constantly reassess for themselves whether they are suitable to take on the challenging tasks for themselves and in the team.

The following list of questions may be helpful to check where your own strengths and possible weaknesses lie, firstly for yourself and then in dialogue with the team and others. If all these questions can be answered in the affirmative, then you are fundamentally suitable as a teacher for an inclusive school. If you have difficulties with individual points, these will have a negative impact on the chances of effectively implementing inclusion in your communicative, cooperative and teaching-related activities.

1. “Am I fundamentally willing and open to be an advocate and defender for a diverse culture, by working with families and learners from very different cultural backgrounds, with individual forms and values, with disadvantages and disabilities as well as with talents and peculiarities, by cooperating and communicating with those involved in order to promote and encourage the growth of all and support the growth of all abilities of the learners? (my pedagogical basic attitude)
2. Are my actions fundamentally designed to be participatory, and can I avoid any know-it-all attitude, even if I may know more than others, in order to work together with the people involved in education and training in my inclusive school to combine existing resources with successful solutions? (my basic democratic attitude)
3. Can I adequately put into perspective my own cultural norms and values of my own socialisation and accept that families and people develop different attitudes, in order to develop a common respectful approach and mutual tolerance within the framework of a democratic culture?  (my basic cultural attitude)
4. Do I have the highest expectations of all learners, and do I value the opportunities that each individual learner has? Do I value their efforts and successes in my communication with them and do I help them develop their personal excellence? (my pursuit of excellence rather than mediocrity)
5. Am I prepared to educate myself fully about the diversity of my learners and the current culture in order to bridge the gap between closeness and remoteness to education and to find measures that can help to bring inclusive development and education available to all? (my attitude towards equal opportunities)
6. Are the learners at the centre of my efforts to provide cooperative, communicatively successful forms to encourage all learners, even those with different backgrounds, to find their own ways of learning, to work together with others, to achieve successful results? (my learner-centred approach)
7. Am I prepared to use teaching methods that help to convey topics and contents in such a way that an external subject perspective with average expectations is not taken as the primary measure of success, but rather targeted on the basis of the different preconditions of the learners, which are to achieve their own personal excellence, in order to achieve the greatest possible progress in all culturally relevant areas of learning? (my realistic performance attitude)
8. Do I enable learners to have different perspectives and approaches to learning in order to reach learning outcomes, to present them and to share them with others? (my methodological support approach)
9. Do I ensure that the curriculum is related to the world of life and work and oriented to the learners, connected with their cultural backgrounds and with relevant topics in culture, science and technology as well as with the social living environment? (my realistic learning expectations)
10. Am I prepared to contribute with my knowledge and behavior constructively to a teaching and support team, to adapt to the needs and wishes of others, to creatively create and adopt a communicative, cooperative, helpful and supportive attitude towards all persons in the inclusive school? (my positive team attitude)

Source:

Literature

About the authors

name: Heidrun Demo

Her work centers on equity in education, with a particular focus on supporting diverse learners, fostering inclusive teaching practices, and driving inclusive school development. She is deeply involved in research and teacher training, dedicated to creating and sustaining inclusive learning environments.

name: Rosa Anna Ferdigg

Rosa Anna Ferdigg earned her degree at Bologna University in Italy and has since had a long career in the South-Tyrolean (Italy) school system, holding various positions such as teacher, headmaster, inspector, and evaluator. In addition to these roles, she collaborates with universities in Italy and Germany on inclusion topics. Rosa Anna is also a consultant for inclusive school development on an international level. Her interests are focused on system changing and development, exploring how people can learn and develop their skills, and how they can contribute to changing systems in an inclusive direction with their individual influence.

name: Valerio Ferrero

Valerio Ferrero does research in the field of intercultural education, focusing on equity and inequality in schools. He is also interested in community philosophical practices, on which he also carries out training activities. Before starting his research work, he was a primary school teacher.

name: Veronica Punzo

Veronica Punzo is attorney at the Macerata Bar. Dealing with the governance and regulation of personal and non-personal data and ethical-legal consulting, her research area focuses on the domains of artificial intelligence and education with a focus on dignity, equality and fundamental rights enhancement and protection.