Promoting Inclusive Education through the lens of UDL. A Teacher Professional Development Action-Research

The theoretical framework of the research moves within a perspective of inclusive education as a transformative know-how oriented to the enhancement of diversity as an intrinsic quality of every educational context. Schools are called to assume universality and fl exibility as goals and values since the design steps, to ensure everyone has equal access to the learning process (Booth & Aiscow, 2014; Florian & Beaton, 2018). In this sense, diverse studies highlight the framework of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) (CAST, 2018) can support the implementation of curricula able to facilitate everyone’s academic success while promoting equity and active participation for all. The UDL framework emphasizes the importance of building expert learners in any context; pupils who are: confi dent to translate new information into meaningful and useful knowledge; strategic and goal-oriented; determined, motivated, able to withstand effort and regulate emotional reactions (Mayer, Rose, Gordon, 2014). This means fostering the development of learner agency, as pupils are active protagonists of the entire learning process as they are involved in the choices regarding what to learn, why to learn it, and how to share what they have learned (Manyukhina & Wyse). Given this, teaching quality is identifi ed both by the scientifi c literature and by European policies as a strategic lever for every educational improvement, highlighting the need to rethink the pre- service and in-service teachers’ training to promote – in addition to disciplinary, methodological, organizational, and social skills - the development of professional habitus based on recursive refl exivity, self-assessment, research, and agentic skills (Pedone, 2021). The researchers have identifi ed the Teacher Professional Development Action-Research as a suitable methodological framework. It is a specifi c declination of the Action-research paradigm (Nigris, Cardarello, Losito, Vannini, 2020) as a combination of research and inservice teacher training, aiming to investigate in the school context with teachers to promote professional development, and transformative changes in actors’ habits and contexts, putting at the heart of the method the social identity of learning processes (Asquini, 2018). The research began in the academic year 2022-2023 and involves 21 voluntary teachers at a lower secondary school, their school principal, and 3 researchers. From the theoretical analysis and the research group dialectics, four research questions emerged: on the one hand, we wondered if the implementation of UDL can improve the inclusive teaching approach as well as have a signifi cant impact on the pupils’ learner agency; on the other hand, we asked if the involvement in the Teacher Professional Development Action-Research can change teachers’ perception of their professional agency and if the professional development of agentic skills can improve the impact on inclusive practices at school. It consists 67 of fi ve steps: 1) Group setup and research objectives defi nition; 2) Training and co-design of lessons and research tools; 3) Class implementation; 4) Evaluation, self-assessment, and results sharing; 5) Impact assessment. To investigate different aspects of the phenomena, the research design is based on a mixed methods approach with the collection, analysis, and interpretation of quantitative and qualitative data (Trinchero & Robasto, 2019). Scientifi c literature highlights that giving voice to the real school protagonists allows the development of an open environment, aimed at leveraging intrinsic motivation and thus promoting the development of agentic skills (Aquario et al., 2017; OBrien, 2016). Thus, to focus on the specifi city of the context and participants’ needs, teachers were previously asked to state the frequency with which they adopt a set of teaching behaviors that meet the UDL guidelines (27 items, Section 1), and what they think are the potential school barriers to the implementation of the framework (10 items, Section 2), using a quantitative survey, built from existing tools (Alsalem, 2018; CAST, 2018). Within the limits of a self-report tool, the outcomes show that the involved teachers implicitly tend to adhere to UDL principles. That suggests they may be open to the reception and adoption of the framework, as they also didn’t highlight contextual barriers to the framework implementation. In light of the above, we expect that the end of the Teacher Professional Development Action- Research will lead teachers to increase the adoption of inclusive practices focused on the UDL framework as well as a sensible change about their agentic skills, with a positive impact on pupils’ learner agency.