Inclusive education is nowadays in the mainstream of educating students with special needs; moreover, it is an important factor in the transformation of entire education systems directed at improving the quality of education. Therefore, it should not come as a surprise that the issue of conditions behind its quality attracts particular attention from researchers. Many studies focus on teachers, their attitude toward the concepts and ways of implementing inclusive education and competencies to work with students with diverse abilities and special needs. The analyses of many studies exhibit that teachers’ positive attitudes towards inclusive education and the increasing acceptance of diversity in schools may both lead to the development of beneficial solutions in this regard and intensify efforts in terms of inclusive practices.
The book Teachers’ Beliefs about Inclusive Education—co-authored by Prof. Zenon Gajdzica—presents and explains the results of longitudinal surveys of the opinions of mainstream school and preschool teachers regarding selected assumptions and organisational solutions underlying inclusive education. The opinions have been examined in the aspects of selected demographic characteristics of the teachers: gender, place of residence, work experience, educational stage they work at (kindergarten, early childhood education, upper primary school, secondary school) and type of institution (public, non-public).
The advantage of the book is that the opinions were gathered in 2020 and 2022. It is worth mentioning how dynamic these two years were to the Polish education system: the COVID pandemic, the sudden influx of students from Ukraine, and the new programme of reforms in the education system published by the Ministry regarding students with special educational needs. The longitudinal survey managed to capture the change in respondents’ opinions about selected theoretical assumptions and organisational solutions for inclusive education. Interestingly, longitudinal research on teachers’ attitudes towards inclusive education is virtually absent in the literature on the subject, which makes the results more intriguing.
Prof. Zenon Gajdzica
Photo by Małgorzata Dymowska