Teacher education for SEND inclusion in an international context: The importance of critical theoretical work

Global commitments to inclusive education have been made in UNESCO’s Sustainable Development Goal, ‘Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for persons with disabilities’ (UNDESA, 2018. p75). With clear evidence that students with disabilities have heightened vulnerability to inequity, teacher education is considered an essential strategy for improving this situation. This chapter explores best practice in teacher education for SEND and inclusion and places emphasis on the importance of theoretical work in the teacher education curriculum. Best practices in teacher education must offer teachers opportunities to resist binary positions on the relevance of impairment to inclusive planning. It argues that critical theory in the form of critical disability studies provides useful theoretical tools, such as the explanation of ‘othering.’ These can make visible and ‘workable-on’, hidden barriers to inclusion including normative discourses. The chapter proposes two practical tools to support critical theorising on practice, reflexive practice, and transgression. Both support critical work on self and system. They also scaffold teacher agency in constructing hybrid forms of resistance/compliance in harmony with the freedoms and constraints operating in local and national sites for practice.

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