Initial Training of Future Education Professionals: Are You Prepared for Inclusion?

Abstract

There is no doubt that we are training our future professionals academically, responding to the curricula designed for such a profession. But the question is whether we are educating them in terms of the responsibility and commitment both to the profession and to the students they have to train. The objective of this research work is to identify the attitude of future professionals toward professional ethics, that is, the attitude of those professionals who will work in an educational centre: teachers, pedagogues, and educational psychologists. In addition, we aimed to find out which are the most significant characteristics of being a good professional. In our research we adopted the descriptive method and for data collection we used an attitude scale. We used the one designed by Hirsch (2005) entitled Scale of Attitudes on Professional Ethics, obtaining satisfactory indicators of reliability and validity. Our sample was composed of the students of the last year of four degrees. It was representative with a 95% confidence level, and 452 students participated. To calculate this we applied simple random sampling, considering the finite population. Of the total sample, 30.8% was represented by students from the degree of Infant Education, 20.5% by Primary Education, 22.1% were studying Pedagogy and 25.3% of the sample was from Psychopedagogy. Our final conclusion is that we do not wish to make the participating students more ethical, but rather that they are able to think ethically about their professional performance. While there is consciousness about ethics, it is very necessary to think more deeply about them, because all students should have been in agreement an ethical attitude. The future education professionals must be able to think ethically about their professional performance. Only then, we will be able to guarantee their commitment to inclusion, because inclusion is an attitude to the teacher.