Inclusion as a joint transformation process

Abstract

Based on a broad understanding of inclusion, inclusive teaching is to be developed within the SING project in multi-professional teams from subject didactics and special education together with students.

Inclusive pedagogy supplements subject-specific didactics seminars with a subject-oriented perspective: starting from the individual developmental stage of each pupil, inclusive lessons are to be developed that do justice to the diversity of the learners. The focus is on learning together. The aim is to develop lessons that are based on dialog and cooperation and do not exclude any pupils.

To this end, the students and lecturers at the schools first collect diagnostic data on the basis of which inclusive learning environments are then designed, tested and evaluated. The focus of the diagnostics is on the individual learning status of the pupils as well as mechanisms within schools and lessons that lead to exclusion.

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The project thinks, acts and researches according to an understanding of inclusion that sees inclusion as a transformation of all selective and exclusionary elements at all levels of the current education system. Understood in this way, inclusive action can only ever be possible if exclusionary or isolating conditions are first taken into consideration. There is therefore no inclusion if existing mechanisms of exclusion, such as discrimination, marginalization and stigmatization, are not addressed. (Ziemen 2018)(Ziemen 2018)

This applies not only to the education system, but also to society as a whole, in line with the sociological dimension of the concept of inclusion/exclusion.

In the SING project, we assume different inequalities that lead to discrimination in society and have an impact on schools. (Ziemen 2018) These relate to exclusion and disadvantage due to disability, socio-economic situation, gender, skin color, origin or sexuality. (ibid.)

For an inclusive school design, this means recognizing the exclusionary conditions and processes of exclusion created by them, confronting them and changing them together in such a way that not everyone has to be equal, but that everyone is given the educational opportunities appropriate to their individual level of development. Teaching should therefore take place collectively through dialog and cooperation on a common subject[1]. In order to be able to realize such inclusive teaching and to design it in such a way that it corresponds to the existing structures of meaning and significance of pupils, a subject orientation is required. Because only if teaching is conceived from the subject can isolating conditions be avoided. (Feuser 1989, 2013)

We therefore understand inclusion at school not only as the elimination of a spatial or curricular separation, but rather as the creation of a common space for dialog, cooperation and development. (Feuser 1989) Learning only takes place through cooperation on the common object in the

zone of next development, i.e. the difference between the level at which the learner can solve the tasks under the guidance or with the help of an adult and the level at which he/she can solve them independently. (Feuser 2013, Jantzen 2010, Vygotskij 1987)

In its research, the SING project teaches students this perspective based on the theory of the cultural-historical school and materialistic disability education and, in cooperation with the students, translates this into practice at school. In interdisciplinary, practice-oriented seminars, the project expands the didactic perspective to include an inclusive pedagogical and subject-oriented perspective in the form of the development, testing and evaluation of inclusive learning environments.