Inclusive teaching strategies - dimensions and agendas

Inclusion has a high priority in education policy all over the world and teachers must be able to handle in practice increasing student diversity and the demands for creating an inclusive learning environment. In spite of the enhanced political focus, there is a lack of research focusing on how those teachers working with inclusion can be supported with more tangible and meaningful ways of understanding and developing inclusive classrooms. This article argues that seeing research in inclusion in close connection with research in effective teaching strategies and classroom management will contribute to an enrichment of the two research fields and give teachers and researchers new opportunities for developing more inclusive schools. Based on research focused on teaching strategies that support students’ opportunities for learning, four dimensions of inclusive teaching strategies are presented: a framing, a relational, a didactic and an organisational dimension. In addition, and in order to further understand teachers work with inclusive education in a more structural perspective, light is shed on the complexity that teachers are required to handle in practice. This complexity, among other things, entails dilemmas emerging from different agendas teachers often must handle themselves.