Contributions from: Clayton Keller - University of Minnesota, Duluth, USA and Ragner Thygesen - Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway.
Abstract
If teachers of the future are to be fully prepared to meet the needs of all children within regular classrooms then pre-service courses must address a range of issues regarding inclusion. While there has been an increasing move to include children with disabilities in regular classrooms, the training of teachers to support this movement has been very slow to adapt in some places. Courses which do include units of work on children with disabilities have focused on traditional lecture / tutorial sessions that report evidence from written publications as their major source of information.
This research reports the findings of an innovative approach to teacher training that employed Internet Conferencing with pre-service and graduate teachers from Australia, the USA, and Norway, in order to enable them to discuss the latest trends in inclusion with their international peers. The use of the package ivisit allowed students access to audio, visual & written communications with other education students in the three countries. Topics of discussion included policy & practice issues, service provision, legal issues, and cultural differences in the inclusion movement across jurisdictions. Students were able to discuss and debate current issues and to gain a better understanding of global trends in the inclusion movement.
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25/07/2000