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Inclusive Education: Theory vs practise in English Teacher Education
By Jeyra Vargas and Cristina Palomino
“...most English teachers do not have the chance to receive training in inclusion despite of all the demands of the Colombian government.”
The Colombian government has been guaranteeing education for people from all walks of life for the last three decades. Since then policies, laws and regulations have been written in order to favor the inclusion of the most vulnerable pockets of society in the classroom. These population ranges from people that belong to different ethnicities, races, ages and students with special talents to citizens with physical and mental disabilities. Concerning the latter, we carried out a research study that focuses on the education of students with disabilities. This idea came up since throughout our education, we have shared our classroom with learners with visual, hearing, cognitive and mobility disabilities, and that has lead us to reflect on the extent to which, we, future English teachers, have been empowered to cope with these challenges.
Since our field is English teaching, as we designed our investigation we set three objectives for ourselves: First, we wanted to know how Colombian universities are educating future teachers to deal with students with disabilities and with the requirements of the law in this respect, second, we were interested in knowing the reasons why there are still some programs that neglect these matters in their curricula, and finally to raise awareness of the necessity of being educated in this respect. In order to do this, we collected information about the study plans of ELT program from the Sistema Nacional de Información de Educación Superior (SNIES) and we also put together a questionnaire and an interview to collect data from 13 out of 52 language programs in the country.
Results from this research suggest that most Colombian ELT programs are not educating prospective teachers on inclusive education. To be more specific, there are fifty-two (52) ELT programs in our country and only thirteen (13) of them have a class that deals with inclusion. Besides, when we asked school directors about the reasons why their study plans do not address diversity in the classroom, they stated that it was due to time constraints and neglect of its importance by curricula designers. This is a really shocking fact since, according to Decreto 366 de 2009, in a regular classroom there can be up to ten percent of students with cognitive and mental impairments. So, the big question that remains is: how to face this issue without any training? Should these learners become subjects of our well-meant but not field tested experiments? Is that fair to them and to us as teachers? Wouldn't it be a good idea to acknowledge the importance of these issues and include training on them as part of the classes that we attend as pre-service teachers?
Another finding shows that prospective educators who have never taken a class on inclusion tend to lack interest about such topics. This is the complete opposite to what happens to students who have studied these issue, since the latter ones have the opportunity to take theoretical and practical lessons, and as a consequence, they tend to continue investigating. Nonetheless, when interviewing directors, some of them expressed that one or two courses on inclusive education would not be enough for creating an inclusive classroom that fulfils all students’ needs. Instead, they stated that it would be more productive if they appeared throughout the program. Also, others showed their interest in counting on these courses and affirmed that they will discuss this respect in future meetings.
After having carried out this study, we can conclude that most English teachers do not have the chance to receive training in inclusion despite of all the demands of the Colombian government. Moreover, we discovered that where these lessons have been taught, awareness of diversity among educators and students has risen. Also, they have increased interest in continuing inquiry into this topic. However, we reckon that it is necessary to feed all curricula with these subjects in order to avoid prospective teachers idealizing their classrooms and instead, allow them to face diversity and become more sensitive human beings able to improve the quality of education for all.