PREPARATION OF TEACHERS IN UKRAINE՚S POSTGRADUATE EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS ON ORGANIZATION OF INCLUSIVE SCHOOL EDUCATION

Abstract

YANKOVYCH Oleksandra – Doctor of Pedagogical Sciences, Professor, Head of Pedagogy and Methods of Primary and Pre-school Education Department, Ternopil Volodymyr Hnatyuk National Pedagogical University, Maksym Kryvonos Str., 2, Ternopil, 46027, Ukraine; Kujawy and Pomorze University of Bydgoshch, ul. Torunska, 55-57, Bydgoshch, 85-023, Poland E-mail address: yankov@tnpu.edu.ua ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4253-5954 ResearcherID: https://publons.com/researcher/1927393/oleksandra-yankovych/ PRYMAKOVA Vitaliia – Doctor of Pedagogical Sciences, Professor, Education, Psychology and Inclusive Education Department, Kherson Academy of Continuing Education, Pokrysheva Str., 41, Kherson, 73000, Ukraine E-mail address: pran703@gmail.com ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8914-6748 ResearcherID: https://publons.com/researcher/1696005/vitaliia-prymakova/ To cite this article: Yankovych, O., & Prymakova, V. (2019). Preparation of teachers in Ukraine’s postgraduate education institutions on organization of inclusive school education. Liudynoznavchi studii. Seriia «Pedahohika» – Human Studies. Series of «Pedagogy» , 9/41, 77–87. doi: 10.24919/2413-2039.9/41.175702. Article history Received: May 21, 2019 Received in revised form: June 25, 2019 Accepted: July 20, 2019 Available online: September 24, 2019 Journal homepage: http://lssp.dspu.edu.ua/ p-ISSN 2313-2094 e-ISSN 2413-2039 © 2019 The Authors. Human studies. Series of «Pedagogy» published by Drohobych Ivan Franko State Pedagogical University & Open Journal Systems. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ ). The article is devoted to the problem of training teachers in organizing inclusive school education and to the role of Ukrainian postgraduate education institutions in it. The influence of external factors (the socio-economic condition of the country and its health care system, educational concepts and legislative acts, environmental threats) on the development of inclusive education in Ukraine has been demonstrated. The difficulty of introducing the inclusive form of education in the modern educational system of Ukraine has been outlined, consisting particularly in the lack of qualified staff, insufficient material resources for equipping inclusion centres, the imperfect content of education, the lack of clearly defined standards for the assessment of teaching children with disabilities, etc. The structure of teachers’ readiness for the organization of inclusive forms of education has been determined to include motivational-personal, cognitive-operational, and reflexive-evaluative components. A criterion-diagnostic toolkit of teachers’ readiness to work with children with certain peculiarities of their psychophysical development has been substantiated; relevant criteria (personal-value, informational-activity, design-analytical) and level indicators (high, medium, low) have been specified. We have developed and experimentally tested a methodology of teacher training in postgraduate education institutions in organizing inclusive school education. It is presented as an open system consisting of target, content, procedural and effective components and comprises a comprehensive teacher training program for organizing inclusive education. It calls for the formation in teachers of complex knowledge about the organization of inclusive education, the ability to draw up individual programs that would help with correction of a child’s psychophysical development and such analytical skills as analysing, monitoring and further adjusting of their own professional activities in the specified field. Innovative technologies and methods of work have been described. The expediency of the interactive, project and case study methods has been demonstrated. The emphasis is laid on the need for self-education. The efficiency of the experimental methodology has been proved: in the wake of the formative experiment, the number of teachers with an average readiness to organize the inclusive form of education increased from 34.7 % (recorded during the summative experiment) to 61.6 %; the number of persons showing low level readiness decreased from 65.3 % to 36.5 %. This conclusion confirms the necessity of finding new ways of organizing inclusive forms of education as numerous peculiarities of children’s psychophysical development, socioeconomic and medical issues affect the quality of teacher training. Acknowledgments. The authors of the article express their gratitude to Professor A. Zubko, the rector of «Kherson Academy of Continuing Education» in Kherson, for his support of the study. Funding. The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.