Professionalization for teaching in inclusive classrooms within interdisciplinary video-based seminars

Abstract

This article presents the conceptualization of an interdisciplinary video-based seminar implemented in teacher education at university. The seminar aims at promoting students’ professional vision of teaching in inclusive classrooms. As a first step towards this goal, students map out and reflect on their subjective theories about what they consider high quality teaching in inclusive classrooms, which may contradict findings from educational and psychological research. To highlight different disciplinary perspective on high quality teaching in inclusive classrooms, the seminar explicitly integrates perspectives from school pedagogy, special education, and psychology. Next, these perspectives are used to develop a grid helping students to systematically observe teaching in inclusive classrooms. Finally, the grid is used in video analyses and real-life observations of inclusive classrooms. The evaluation of the seminar showed positive changes with regard to several variables such as attitudes towards inclusive education and educational knowledge.