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Inclusive Education in Early Childhood: Developing Good Practices
Start date: Sep 1, 2014, End date: Aug 31, 2017 PROJECT  FINISHED 

European Union Commission puts emphasis on education and training policy that enables all citizens, irrespective of their personal, social or economic circumstances, to acquire, update and develop over a lifetime both job‐specific skills and the key competences needed for their employability and to foster further learning, active citizenship and intercultural dialogue. It is also believed that early childhood education and care can lay the foundations for these goals in life in terms of education, well-being, employability, and social integration, especially for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. Educational disadvantage should be addressed by providing high quality early childhood education and targeted support, and by promoting inclusive education. Inclusive education can be defined as the education of children with and without disabilities in the same setting, mostly in classrooms. Its primary goal is to fight marginalization and exclusion. Inclusive education can be regarded as an important way to achieve “Education for All”. The responsibilities and roles of teachers change with inclusive practices and teachers are expected to understand the characteristics of children with disadvantages, adapt the curriculum according to their developmental level and interact with all children, including the ones with disadvantages. However, previous literature states that preschool and primary school teachers are not adequately prepared to teach children with disadvantages and they do not have sufficient knowledge and skills to teaching in inclusive classrooms. In addition, since pre-service training offers little to teachers to prepare them for this kind of work, there is concern about inadequacy of teacher preparation in terms of meeting the educational needs of disadvantaged children. The main goal of the project is to produce a manual with the models of inclusive education of the different participating countries and create a transnational model with all the best components together in the languages of participating countries to be used in teacher preparation for the development of competencies and talents of children in inclusive classrooms, as intellectual output of the project. Next to it, this model will be illustrated with ‘good practices’ from different countries as case studies. The model will also be supported by examples of activities developed by experts of the different countries in different disciplines. This model and the activities for good practices will be introduced to the pre-service teachers to evaluate the effectiveness of the manual. It will also be provided in the languages of participating countries. During the project two intensive study programmes, which will award 4 ECTS to participating students, will be organized . The goal of the intensive programmes is to provide participants with opportunities to learn and compare different good practices of inclusive education, and to gain intercultural understanding about how to develop competencies and talents of disadvantaged children in inclusive classrooms. 112 social education students and pre-service teachers will participate in the two ISPs. The training will be provided by 25 teachers, who will get active part during the implementation of the project and developing of intellectual output.

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