Teachers’ training and inclusive processes in the kindergarten, primary and secondary school: a field research

Inclusion is a continuous process aimed to promote learning and participation of all students, opposing every kind of exclusion and helping educative contexts to take charge diversity of life contexts, interests, experiences, knowledges and competences of students. For development of inclusive processes, teachers’ training represents a necessary change of paradigm in the secondary school that has to be even more organic and systemic. In fact, already in the report by OCSE in 2005, called “Teachers matter: attracting, development and retaining effective teachers”, it affirms that “improvement of quality of teachers’ training is a priority for the single national politics”. To renew the scholastic system and educational systems it’s fundamental starting from teachers’ training, because they have a fundamental role in the process of construction of an inclusive society. This research is part of a wider research concerning teachers as curricular ones or teachers for support activities in the kindergarten, primary and secondary school. This contribution focuses its attention on training in service of teachers in the kindergarten, primary and secondary school, carried out in the scholastic years 2017-18 and 2018-19, within the Teachers’ Training National Plan in several schools of Sicilian territory that involved 85 teachers. This article is a report about the training program for teachers, known nationally as National Plan for Teachers’ Training, implemented in the Sicilian context, with particular reference to the teachers’ training for inclusion of all students. The aim of this report is testifying a procedure that, although its transitional nature, contributed to the teachers’ training in service, showing weakness and strength points that emerged during this experience. To allow to teachers to acquire more awareness about their own educational and didactic acting, we chose to plan and to make with them, starting from specific theoretic contents of each one, an inclusive didactic practice to develop and to apply the individual inclusive competences. In the final results, we underline how, firstly, the planning process, and secondly, the realization one of inclusive didactic practices represented for teachers an analysis, reflection and confrontation moment about their own professionality and the meaning and inclusive value of the actions accomplished by them. Among the most interesting results of the research show that: the inclusion processes improve qualitatively only if it improves the quality of training of all teachers; reflection and critical re-elaboration in an inclusive perspective are fundamental for the training of all the teachers, not only for the specialized ones; and how inclusive pedagogic and didactic methodologies are efficient only if they are transferred in everyday life.