Recent years have seen extensive efforts in many countries to ensure that the right to educational opportunity is extended to all members of the community. In so doing it has also become increasingly apparent that traditional forms of schooling are no longer adequate and in line with inclusive principles. Faced with this challenge, including the presence of a wide variety of students who may experience barriers in their learning within conventional arrangements (students from diverse socio-economic and cultural backgrounds; gender and sexual orientations; religious and faith beliefs; communication and language difficulties; and physical and psychological issues), teachers have to think about how they
should respond. So what kind of practices might help teachers to ‘reach out’ to all members of the class? How can teachers be helped to develop more inclusive practices?

All students are entitled to a quality education, i.e. finding better ways for enabling each and every learner to be engaged in meaningful learning activities and make progress. In order to achieve all this, educators need an openness to student diversity, an attitude of appreciation for diversity, an assumption that it is normal to be different and to provide a differentiated curriculum and learning experience. Students are diverse and engage with the curriculum at diverse points and in diverse ways; hence effective teachers are first of all: committed towards equity, social justice, and democracy; prepared to move away from the medical-integrative model rooted in ‘deficit-thinking’ ideologies; and willing to implement inclusive and culturally responsive pedagogies and strategies in schools.

Hence educators are the key protagonists in the development of inclusive forms of education. Their beliefs, attitudes and actions are what create the contexts in which students are required to learn. In order to cater for the various needs and learning styles of the children under their care, it is fundamental that educators put in place the principles of inclusion through classroom practices as this is key to a fruitful and effective learning experience for all. Therefore, the ultimate objective of this course is to help teachers feel supported as well as challenged in relation to their responsibility to keep exploring more effective ways of facilitating the learning of all students. In so doing this course promotes the idea that difficulties experienced by students result from the ways in which schools are currently organised, and from the forms of curricula and provided teaching. To guarantee high quality education for all learners, schools need to be transformed and pedagogy needs to be improved in ways that lead educators to respond positively to student diversity and to see individual difference not as a list of endless problems to be fixed, but as opportunities for experimentation in order to develop more effective processes and practices for equity, respect for diversity and inclusion.

By the end of this programme, participants should be able to: