Preservice Teachers´ Attitudes Towards Inclusive Education in Secondary Education
Rosa Eva Valle Florez, University of León (Spain)
Abstract
Teachers in compulsory secondary-school education in Spain and in many others countries, need to accept responsibility for creating a successful, social and emotional academic environment for students with Special Educational Needs (SEN) within mainstream schools. Generally, these teachers have not been trained in their academic degree about issues of psychology and didactic to develop their classes. They have not received any training about specific learning difficulties and how to deal with them. For this reason, all future teachers of compulsory secondary education must be enrolled in a master degree in teacher training to enable them to exercise these roles. High rates of school failure of our country indicate that it is necessary to train and sensitize teachers to cope successfully with the wide range of abilities and needs of their students. Knowledge and positive attitude towards this diversity is an important factor in the success of inclusive education as shown by several national and international researches (Pijl, 2010; Hag & Mundia, 2012; Sharma, 2012; Hernández y Carrasco, 2012; Colmenero, Pantoja & Pegalajar, 2013; Bhatnagar &,Das, 2014; Varcoe & Boyle, 2014; Srivastava, de Boer & Pijl, 2015).
Therefore, this paper analyse the attitudes and level of knowledge of these future teachers on pupils with SEN in a sample of 260 teachers enrolled in that master degree at the University of León between the years 2012-2015. We used a descriptive and interpretive methodology through a survey questionnaire specifically created for these study. The questionnaire combines both multiple choice and open-ended questions to garner better understanding. It was carried out a reliability study of this instrument that shows appropriate indicators of internal consistency of the conforming items. The results show differences depending on degree of access to the master: prior knowledge of the SEN, general attitudes toward the inclusion, the difficulties perceived by type of disability and the strategies to be put in place. For this reason, the findings should be considered for future teacher training programs.