What do classroom teachers say in relation to inclusive education?

Abstract

This study is concerned with primary school teachers’ thoughts on inclusive education and with in-class arrangements. The study, which was designed in qualitative study method, focuses on four sub-problems. The study group was composed of 10 classroom teachers who worked in Konya city centre. The data was collected from the teachers with semi-structured interview forms. The participants were asked four questions about the four sub-problems. Accordingly,for the first sub-problem,they were asked what inclusive education was and what it meant to them with the purpose of revealing their levels of readiness for inclusive education. For the second sub-problem, they were asked what activities they did in relation to in-class physical adaptations. For the third sub-problem, the teachers’ practices in relation to their instructional adaptations were investigated. And for the fourth sub-problem, the difficulties they encountered in practising inclusive education as well as the facilitating factors were searched. The data were put to content analysis, the themes were distinguished for the sub-problems and the themes were divided into categories.The findings demonstrated that the teachers were informed of inclusive education and that they made regulationsin their physical adaptations according to the classroom arrangement, seating arrangement in the classroom and students’ incapability. The participants stated that they used instructional adaptations by taking students’ personal traits, developmental properties and language development according to their ethnicity into consideration in accordance with contemporary system of education. The results obtained as a result of the interviews were discussed along with relevant literature.