Collaboration in inclusive education: teachers' perspectives and practices.

Collaboration is a recurring theme in the literature as both a primary vehicle and precondition for successfully developing inclusive learning communities and pedagogies. In this research project, we aim to investigate how teachers understand collaboration, the nature of the collaborative relationships and how they develop their competencies and knowledge about inclusion in the process, using a collective case-study design. The purpose of the case studies is to capture the individuals' perceptions and dynamics of individuals and in this case to learn about teacher collaboration in schools, teachers' relational agency and also their responsiveness to the diverse learning needs of all learners in their classrooms. The sample will comprise 2 full-service primary schools in the Western Cape and 3 primary schools in Flanders with 10 volunteer teachers per country. The project is designed to generate data over a period of at least 6 months using interviews and observations. The data will be organized, collated and transformed by way of a variety of methods of analysis including and beginning with content analysis in constructivist grounded theory mode, discourse and critical discourse analysis, as well as conversation analysis with selected small sets of data of especially naturally occurring talk (and text). The case studies will be compared per country and across countries to generate themes for understanding the complexity of collaborative processes in inclusive education.

Keywords:PEDAGOGY

Disciplines:Education curriculum, Education systems, General pedagogical and educational sciences, Specialist studies in education, Other pedagogical and educational sciences

Project type:Collaboration project