Inclusive Teacher Education as Education for Future Teachers of Inclusive Schools?!

• In Event: Educational Organizations: Toward Equality and Inclusion Organizing Equality and Social Justice Through Inclusion

Abstract

The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UN CRPD) claims an inclusive education at all levels of the educational system: “Persons with disabilities can access an inclusive, quality and free primary education and secondary education on an equal basis with others in the communities in which they live” (Art.24 §2(b)) and “States Parties shall ensure that persons with disabilities are able to access general tertiary education, vocational training, adult education and lifelong learning without discrimination and on an equal basis with others.” (Art. 24 §5.1) Employing “teachers with disabilities […] to work at all levels of education” (Art. 24 § 4) is explicitly mentioned.
This leads to the question in how far teacher education in Germany and other countries is organized in an inclusive way – and what exactly does that mean in the way how tertiary education is organized. Some discourse has been going on about an inclusive primary education (e.g. Heinzel et al. 2017, Stähling 2011). In German secondary education there is a vivid discourse about inclusion as well (e.g. Kiel 2014; Siedenbiedel 2019). However, it is still under discussion whether the claim of inclusive education goes for the selective structure of the Gymnasium as well (Siedenbiedel 2016; Siedenbiedel 2017). But there is hardly any discussion about how to make teacher education more inclusive with regard to the diversity of its students. “Inclusive teacher education” rather means preparing an exclusive selection of students for an inclusive school (Siedenbiedel 2020).
The question how to organize an inclusive teacher education without discrimination against students with disabilities is rather at the beginning. There is a field of tension between the ideas of testing the aptitude of teacher education students and that of granting equal chances for all who would like to be qualified as teachers (Terhart 2014; Nolle 2016).
Apart from general questions of a barrier-free accessibility of universities that go for all study programms, there are some specific questions that arise in the context of teacher education. They address job-specific topics like that of dyslexia or dyscalculia: Should university strive to qualify students with dyslexia and / or dyscalculia as future teachers for pupils with (and without) dyslexia and/or dyscalculia? Or are the abilities to follow the rules of orthography and mathematics among the non-negotiable pre-conditions of becoming a teacher?
Other topics are psychological pre-conditions for the job as a teacher and the questions about support and compensations of disadvantages.
The question is which forms of support universities provide and which are the legal preconditions to obtain these. In teacher education additional barriers can occur when it comes to practical teaching experiences. For a limited period of time students experience teaching in real life classrooms in schools.
In this contribution interviews with students with disabilities or disadvantages are evaluated by means of a qualitative content analysis (Kuckartz 2018; Mayring 2015) with regard to the question what kind of support might empower them to finish their teaching experience in a successful way in order to qualify them for becoming teachers of inclusive schools with an inclusive staff.

Author

• Catrin Siedenbiedel, Universität Kassel