Teacher Education for Inclusion : Changing Paradigms and Innovative Approaches

How teachers might best be prepared to work in schools with an increasingly diverse pupil population is of concern to educational academics, professionals and governments around the world. Changes that have taken place in legislation and practice often fail to taken into account how practitioners can ensure that all children and young people are able to achieve.

The focus of this international text is on innovative practices for preparing teachers to work in inclusive classrooms and schools. Drawing on both pre and in-service training methods, the expert contributors to this book follow three major themes:

• social and political challenges regarding teacher education – providing an historical perspective on the training of teachers, tensions in preparing teachers for inclusion, cultural issues, the relationship between educational funding and practices and collaborative measures to support a whole school approach
• innovative approaches in pre-service teacher preparation – discussing a range of innovative models and approaches used in pre-service teacher education courses
• engaging professional development for inservice teachers – reviewing a range of approaches employed to engage working teachers and help them establish curricula and pedagogy that meets the needs of all students in their classes.

Each chapter will include a list of proposed learning outcomes, a theoretical or conceptual framework to help readers develop the proposed innovation, an overview of recent research, discussion of the research data available and a discussion of the international implications and challenges, summarising in suggestions for a positive way forward.

Teacher Education for Inclusion: Changing Paradigms and Innovative Approaches is essential reading for practising teacher educators, school leaders, university lecturers in education and post graduate students.

Chris Forlin is Professor of Special and Inclusive Education at the Hong Kong Institute of Education. She has also edited Reform, Inclusion and Teacher Education: Towards a New Era of Special Education in the Asia-Pacific region (Routledge, 2008).