Sustainable teacher education – internal relations in school practices

Inclusion in schools remains a topic of significant debate across research, practice, and education. Despite ongoing efforts to make education more inclusive, many children continue to be segregated into special schools. Current initiatives aim to reorganize the school and its support systems to address this issue, which can be described as a ‘Gordian Knot’ in inclusive education. Countries reduce special schools and create hybrid models blending general and special education to enhance participation for more children in mainstream schools. This shift entails a rethinking of schools, applied pedagogy, support systems, including the roles of teachers, school psychologists, municipal organizations, and administrative procedures as well as rethinking the boundaries between general and special education so that pedagogical approaches are not defined solely by institutional affiliation.
Meanwhile, there is an increase in newly qualified teachers who experience a “practice shock”. This can be linked to increasingly complex school problems and constrained teaching conditions, as well as to the structure of teacher education, which may not sufficiently address the continuously developing practices and conditions in school. Within research, practice, and education, significant emphasis is placed on various methods to support students' social and academic development and professionals’ collaboration to support it. These methods often change with trends, so teacher education must not only introduce students to special education or collaboration methods but also enable them to analyze the school practices and issues these methods aim to address. This suggests a need for teacher education that focuses on understanding schools' structural conditions and how school problems and support systems evolve within a changing landscape of conditions.
The presentation outlines the development of a new special education course at Teacher Education at UCL in Denmark, created in collaboration among practitioners, researchers, and educators. In this course, students gain insights into school practices and surrounding institutional structures including Educational Psychological Services (EPS), special education institutions, and child psychiatry. The approach emphasizes that future teachers need to develop an understanding of the school's structural conditions and those of its support systems, as well as how they are internally related. The course framework is based on Borring’s research (2024) on interprofessional collaboration between schools and EPS. It incorporates Axel’s concept of 'conflictual cooperation' (2020) and Ollman’s 'internal relations of social practices' (2015) to understand how teachers' work is shaped by diverse parties at local, municipal, and national levels. The findings contribute to an understanding of how conditions for working with inclusion evolve through the efforts of multiple stakeholders engaged in school development across intersecting organizational layers. This approach aims to empower future teachers to engage in, analyze, and transform the practices they encounter in schools, thereby creating a more sustainable teacher education.