Regular teachers’ representations of school inclusion in Macedonia: A multivariate study

Abstract

This papers aims at exploring regular teachers’ cultural models of school inclusion, in terms of shared representations regarding inclusive education and relationships with disabled children and special educators within inclusive settings. An ad hoc questionnaire was administered to a convenience sample of 80 Macedonian regular teachers recruited from three schools placed in Skopje. Multivariate statistical techniques were performed in order to detect both some groupings of participants sharing the same response patterns (cluster analysis) and the main factors (multiple correspondence analysis) accounting for the overall variability. Some illustrative variables (age, gender, years of tenure and reference school) were also used to test their association with clusters. Results show four different groupings of regular teachers who respectively express: a vision of inclusion limited to peer social relationships and avoidant attitude towards students with disability (23.7%), a low perceived usefulness of inclusion and substantial disengagement towards it (38.2%), a more realistic conception of inclusion and demand for support provided by special educators (11.8%), a self-referential tendency in managing inclusion without detecting any resource in students with disabilities or within the school context (26.3%). No illustrative variable was significantly associated with detected clusters. Three latent factors were identified which explain the overall variability and deal with regular teachers’ view about: school inclusion, children with disabilities and impact of inclusion on the teaching quality. A multidimensional context-oriented approach in studying reprentations of school inclusion is substained in order to overcome fixed and universal attitudinal constructs unable to account for cultural variability.