Secondary School Teachers’ Views on Inclusion of Students with Special Educational Needs in Regular Classrooms

Abstract

Inclusive education (IE) has widely been recognised as a philosophy to facilitate the goal of Education for All (EFA) worldwide. One important aspect of IE is that it can serve as one of the most pragmatic strategies to respond to student diversity in developing countries (Ainscow and Miles, Developing inclusive education systems: How can we move policies forward? Available at http://www.ibe.unesco.org/fileadmin/user_upload/COPs/News_documents/2009/0907Beirut/DevelopingInclusive_Education_Systems.pdf, 2009). Bangladesh, as part of the developing world, has undertaken several initiatives including policy reforms, awareness creation and teachers’ professional development for addressing inclusivity in regular schools. In particular, in secondary education, the IE initiative is being implemented through government development projects such as Teaching Quality Improvement in Secondary Education (TQI-SEP). Teachers have been trained on various aspects of IE including pedagogical knowledge, curriculum flexibility, and disability and diverse learning needs under TQI-SEP largely since its adoption in 2005. Research, however, has identified the ‘pessimistic views’ of teachers as one of the major hindrances to IE in secondary education in Bangladesh (Khan, Critical Literacy: Theories and Practices 6(2):102–118, 2012). In this chapter, our aim is to better understand the factors embedded in the views of secondary teachers regarding the inclusion of students with special educational needs (SEN) in regular classrooms. Based on a semi-structured, one-on-one interview approach, we collected data from 15 purposively chosen teachers from 5 secondary schools in Dhaka city. Following a general inductive thematic analysis procedure, we found that although most of the teachers held favourable views on the inclusion of students with SEN, they seemed to lack the pedagogical knowledge of IE, which resulted in inadequate provision of pragmatic teaching practices. We also found a generally sympathetic view rather than a spirit of access and equity in the responses of the majority of the teachers in relation to the need for IE for students with SEN. We discuss the findings in line with other studies as to how secondary education teachers can be better prepared for addressing more in-depth inclusive practices in their classrooms.