Theoretical Framework Dealing with diversity at school can be considered being a key challenge for inclusive education. Since teachers’ competence has a crucial impact on successful teaching (Kunter et al., 2013),... [ view full abstract ]
Theoretical Framework
Dealing with diversity at school can be considered being a key challenge for inclusive education. Since teachers’ competence has a crucial impact on successful teaching (Kunter et al., 2013), supporting pre-service teachers in building up competence for dealing with diversity successfully is of central interest in teacher education. Therefore, universities must think about ways of preparing pre-service teachers for inclusive education by implementing learning opportunities dealing with diversity into the curriculum (Savolainen et al., 2012). Based on recent reviews highlighting central didactical concepts which make teacher professional development happen successfully both for pre-service and in-service teachers (Kennedy, 2016), the research project “I-Ball” analyses empirically the effect of different types of subject-specific learning opportunities on pre-service teachers’ competence regarding beliefs, self-efficacy and pedagogical content knowledge about inclusive education.
Method
Therefore some inclusive learning opportunities have been newly developed and implemented into the curriculum of the Leuphana University. The content focus on “sport activities in different settings regarding several diversity categories”; diversity focus on “the social construction of categories like blindness, physically handicapped, mentally handicapped, gender and migration”; didactical concept is “professional development by practical realization and reflection of wheelchair sport”.
The learning opportunities have been conducted by a university tutor and a head coach of the German national team for wheelchair basketball. The learning opportunities have been evaluated by administering questionnaires twice, once immediately before starting and once immediately after finishing the intervention. The questionnaires focus i.a. self-reported pedagogical content knowledge about subject-specific inclusive education.
Results
The result shows positive changes in self-reported pedagogical content knowledge of the participants following the learning opportunities. The methodological conception of the sessions (specially, the experience of a handicap by playing wheelchair basketball) allows the participants to change their attitudes, which can be seen as a central element of pre-service teacher education.
