Primary Level English Medium School Teachers’ Attitude towards Inclusive Education in Bangladesh

Abstract

Globally, Inclusive Education (IE) has been considered as the most efficient and cost-effective way to ensure education of all learners in the same setting. While practicing IE, teachers are being considered as the key players for ensuring active participation of all learners in the classroom through applying inclusive pedagogy. Extensive research has shown that teachers’ attitude towards inclusive education is a significant indicator of their performances in inclusive classrooms. In the context of Bangladesh, English medium schools are playing an important role in ensuring participation of more than 30,000 children in primary education. Hence, inclusion of all learners of English medium schools mostly depend on what belief and attitude teachers of those specific schools possess towards inclusive education. The objective of this research was to measure the level of attitudes (combination of sentiments, attitudes & concerns) towards IE among the primary level English medium school teachers’ who are responsible personnel for promoting IE practice along with all other teachers of Bangladesh. Furthermore, effect of different demographic variables (i.e. age, gender etc.) on teachers’ attitudes towards inclusive education were also measured. This research was conducted in two phases. In phase-1 the Sentiments, Attitudes, Concerns regarding Inclusive Education-Revised (SACIE-R) scale was used for collecting data along with a demographic questionnaire from 120 randomly selected teachers who were from 18 Bangladeshi primary level English medium schools. The overall means score of SACIE scale indicated that primary level English medium school teachers had moderately positive attitude towards IE. By applying multiple regression analysis, it was found that several demographic variables such as age, gender, confidence in teaching students with disabilities and training on teaching students with disabilities had significant relationship with participants’ sentiment, attitude and concern toward inclusive education. Two findings from phase one were found to be contradictory with previous researches. Firstly, female teachers had shown less positive attitudes and more concerns than male teachers. Secondly, teachers who had longer training on teaching student with disabilities surprisingly showed less positive attitude than the teacher who had shorter training, and the teachers without any training in this aspect showed most positive attitude. Moreover, comparison among the subscales revealed that level of concern of teachers was comparatively higher than other two subscale. That indicates that this group of teachers are more concern about the implication of IE rather than their positive attitude towards IE. In order to get further understating about these inconsistent data along with the answers of research question no three and four (regarding challenges in implementing IE and possible strategies to overcome those challenges), a semi-structured, open ended questionnaire was prepared. This questionnaire was used as a data collection tool for the next phase. In phase- 2, a face-to-face semi-structured interview schedule was conducted on 20 randomly selected teachers (from the samples of the first phase). Findings of the study indicate that females’ family responsibilities, gender role in teaching, gender exposer in male domination society and behavioral challenges could be the possible reasons for their less positive attitude and more concern than male teachers. The possible reasons behind less positive attitude of teachers could be theory-based training, assumption-based answer, teachers’ mind set, or negative experience. According to phase 2, the possible reasons of increased level of concerns could be classroom management challenge, attitude of stakeholders, lack of training, and concern of extra workload. This phase also focused on identifying challenges regarding IE and possible strategies to solve. Based on the analysis, several recommendations were provided by researcher for improving the level of attitudes of primary level English medium teachers in Bangladesh.