Designing an inclusive school – developing teaching concepts and organisational structures for an inclusive school

The SING project ran from January 2018 to March 2021. The results of the joint design process of science, practice and teacher education were published in the anthology Langner et. al (2022). "Schule inklusiv gestalten - das Projekt SING" published by Waxmann Verlag. The report on the BMBF metaproject can be found on the website "Qualifizierung für Inklusion", the summary of all sub-projects of the funding guideline can be found in the BMBF brochure "Fachkräftequalifizierung für inklusive Bildung: Ergebnisse und Produkte aus fünf Jahren Forschung" (2022).

The SING project connects specialist and occupational didactics with special education didactics in order to establish competences for the development of inclusive teaching as part of teacher training studies. Through this inclusive teaching, each individual pupil will be supported and empowered in their development. For this purpose, the more theoretical approaches of the vocational or subject-didactic development of learning environments will be combined with empirical approaches of case-based, research-based learning. A tool will be developed by which the subject-specific diagnostics of the learners' learning status can be combined with the subject-specific or occupational didactic analysis of the material to be mastered. It will then be possible to produce learning environments based on this. The didactically developed learning environment will be supported by educational technology and made available to all participants via a responsive learning platform. Learning results will also be recorded and evaluated for an assessment of the learning status and for counselling during the process.

Students examine, develop and evaluate teaching-learning settings that establish and develop universities and schools as places for inclusive learning. They are supervised by professional teams of lecturers from the fields of didactics and special education. The competences of the students will be collected and analysed during the process/project in order to be able to ascertain the effectiveness of the measure with regard to the development of teaching competences for inclusive specialist teaching and in order to be able to quickly implement adaptations into the teaching concept.

SING focuses on the micro level of educational design. However, the development of pedagogical programmes is not sustainable without developments at the school level – in this respect, SING is analysing the process management requirements for the organisation of inclusive schools in participating schools and is developing a pilot organisation model 'inclusive school'. At TU Dresden, the project is being carried out by the Center for Integration Studies, with the following departments involved:

• Professur für Erziehungswissenschaft mit dem Schwerpunkt Inklusive Bildung - Projektleitung (Chair of education science / inclusive education - project lead)
• Professur für Arbeits- und Organisationspsychologie (Chair of Work and Organizational Psychology)
• Professur für Bautechnik, Holztechnik, Farbtechnik und Raumgestaltung/Berufliche Didaktik (Chair of Construction Engineering, Wood Technology, Color Technology, and Interior Design/Vocational Didactics)
• Professur für Bildungstechnologie (Chair of Educational Technology)
• Professur für Didaktik der politischen Bildung (Chair of Didactics of Political Education)
• Professur für Grundschulpädagogik/Mathematik (Chair of Primary School Education/Mathematics)
• Professur für Neueste deutsche Literatur und Didaktik der deutschen Sprache und Literatur (Chair of Contemporary German Literature and Didactics of German Language and Literature).

Further information can be found on the TUD project website.

The project was funded by the BMBF (Federal Ministry of Education and Research) as part of the funding guideline “Qualification of educational professionals for inclusive education.” [Duration: January 2018 to December 2020]