Practitioners' Inclusive Beliefs: Views on Inclusion as a Basis for Multiprofessional Collaboration in Extended Education

• In Event: 25.054 - Harnessing the Full Potential of High-Quality After-School Programming: Approaches to Collaboration, Professionalization, and Innovation

Abstract

Germany ratified the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) in 2009. The CRPD states that countries have to “ensure an inclusive education system at all levels and lifelong learning” (United Nations, 2006, p. 16). In the last years, Germany took great steps towards a more inclusive educational system within the curricular school sector. Another major change within the last decade was that Germany more and more extended the extracurricular and afterschool activities and put them under the responsibility of the schools’ principals (‘all-day schools’; ‘Ganztagsschulen’). Some scholars argue that all-day schools might have a specific potential regarding the implementation of an inclusive education system – emphasis is especially given to the multiprofessional composition of the staff. To tap the full potential of both – inclusion and extended education/’all-day schools’ – multiprofessional collaboration is crucial. Therefore, a common understanding of the very basic pedagogic concepts underlying their practices is vital. Hence, in this paper I would especially like to focus what different practitioners at German all-day schools believe inclusion actually is.
The data was taken from the Study on the Development of All-day Schools (StEG; funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research). Interviews with 46 practitioners (26 with teachers and 20 with other staff) were interviewed (‘problem-centered interview’, Witzel & Reiter, 2012). The analytic framework conceptualized by Schmidt (2015) was utilized. Creating InVivo codes (Saldaña, 2013) was the first step. The second step was then to use constant comparison (Glaser & Strauss, 2010) to generate categories of higher order. These categories were used, third, to code all transcripts. Fourth, basic quantitative methods were used to generate empirically driven rationales for case selection. Finally, the fifth step was to create case studies (Yin, 2009) that illustrate the results.
After the first steps 131 different codes emerged which were subsumed under five categories of higher order. Although the analytic procedures are not completely finished yet, codings of one coder (who has already finished coding all transcripts) can be used to generate preliminary results for this proposal. Bivariate analysis (cross tabs and chi-square; using the coded variables and the gender-, school-form-, age- and teacher-vs.-other-staff-variables)especially showed differences between teachers and other staff members. Teachers for example seem to define and criticize the concept of inclusion in the interviews, whereas other staff member do not. The same seems to be true for reflecting other inclusion-relevant stakeholders and the necessity to collaborate.
Although differences between teachers (who are in Germany especially responsible for curricular classes) and other staff members (who are solely responsible for the extracurricular activities) are in line with the research literature, the scholarly significance of the study is to show how these professions emphasize different aspects of inclusion and inclusive practices. This result is discussed against the backdrop of multiprofessional collaboration as a basis for inclusion.

Author

• Stephan Kielblock, Justus Liebig University of Giessen