Resumen de Research section: The impact of a special school placement on student teacher beliefs about inclusive education in Northern Ireland
This article, by Jackie Lambe, lecturer in education, and Robert Bones, lecturer in psychology, both from the University of Ulster, provides a useful review of the current state of policy, practice and teacher education relating to pupils with special educational needs in Northern Ireland. The authors use this review to launch their account of their own investigation into the attitudes towards inclusion of student teachers who had experience of working in special schools. Jackie Lambe and Robert Bones drew data from the transcripts of online discussions involving the student teachers. Using direct quotations from these discussions, the authors here reveal the positive attitudes that the student teachers developed towards practice in the special school settings; the confused or negative responses of the special school staff towards policy on inclusion; and mixed views on the promotion of enhanced collaboration between mainstream and special schools. Interestingly the student teachers, while continuing to value inclusion policy from a human rights perspective, also seemed to become more convinced, during their placements, of the contribution that specialist settings can make – and less confident that inclusion can be made to work effectively, given the current systems of teacher education and school organisation. The research in this article draws on the views of a small sample of student teachers – but the reported shifts in their perspectives illustrate some of the key issues to be confronted in the ongoing development of a more inclusive educational system.
