RDC Inclusion and Special Educational Needs (INSEN)
INSEN aims to sensitize teacher educators and education systems in Europe and elsewhere to the equal entitlement of all students in their diversity to a quality education. It raises awareness of discrimination in education that may be suffered by any minority group including those with impairments and special educational needs. It promotes the social model of disability and aims towards the development of inclusive schools and classrooms. To this end it promotes dialogue among teacher educators concerned with the enhancement of attitudes, knowledge, and skills that facilitate the development of inclusive cultures, policies and practices in schools, as well as of innovative pedagogical approaches that enable every student to develop and learn.
Objectives
- INSEN was initially focused on special education. It remains concerned with promoting dialogue among those teacher educators who specialize in specific ways of enabling the development of skills in persons despite impairments. However, it is highlighting the training of teachers in inclusive education for all learners as the best way forward also for students with impairments.
- INSEN takes note of how educators are now realizing the increasingly wide diversity of their students and the barriers to learning and discrimination that are experienced by all types of minority groups. This has created a common ground of concern in educators about the learning and participation of all learners, whatever the barriers to learning they may experience. Such barriers may furthermore be experienced at all levels of education over the lifespan.
- INSEN therefore aims at enabling collaboration among teacher education researchers and practitioners in Europe and worldwide towards overcoming barriers to learning. It specifically tries to promote exchange of programmes, knowledge and expertise about the development of: (a) inclusive learning cultures that value each individual learner whatever his or her characteristics; (b) inclusive learning policies that establish the right of each individual learner to a quality education; and (c) inclusive learning practices that provide an appropriate differentiated learning and supportive environment that enables the participation of all learners in the educational activities of their peers.
Projects
The pursuit of the above objectives is illustrated in two recent Comenius 2.1 projects – each of three years - that arose out of the meetings of this RDC and have been coordinated by its chairs:
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Prof Mette Borga (Norway), with Manchester Metropolitan University and the University of Tartu, Estonia, coordinated a project in 2001-04 that produced a course booklet and manual on “questions of equal opportunities for minority ethnic pupils”: see website www.did.stu.mmu.ac.uk/comenius/
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Dr Paul A. Bartolo (Malta), with the Universities of Amsterdam, Dalarna (Sweden), Leipzig, and Manchester, and Marijampole College (Lithuania), and the NGO Motivace - zivotni styl, Czech Republic, coordinated the Comenius Project “DTMp: Differentiated Teaching Module for Primary Education: Preparing trainee teachers to respond to pupil diversity” (2004-2007), which produced a set of materials including, Responding to student diversity: Teacher’s handbook, available in seven languagesfrom the website www.dtmp.org