Teaching inclusive physical education for students with disabilities: reinvigorating in-service teacher education in Sri Lanka

Schools are accountable for educating students in specific positive knowledge, skills and values relevant to that specific society. However, it is unclear how disability is perceived and treated by teachers, and how students acquire awareness and positive perceptions towards disability through the teaching-learning process. The concept of critical constructivist teaching in physical education (PE) is that PE teachers organise in order to integrate students with disabilities into classes with students without disabilities, and this could therefore be a critical paradigm shift for challenging existing negative perceptions among students without disabilities towards students with disabilities. The qualitative data that informs this article aimed to provide a comprehensive interpretation of how the methods used by current Sri Lankan PE teachers evolved to include students with disabilities in their regular PE classes. A sample of 90 in-service PE teachers, 10 representing within each of the 9 provinces of Sri Lanka were recruited to this study. Data were collected according to the descriptive phenomenological method through focus group interviews and analysed by thematic analysis according to Colaizzi's descriptive phenomenological data analysis method. The degree of knowledge regarding disability, preparedness and inclusion practice of PE teachers were determined. Results revealed that Sri Lankan PE teachers were generally less confident about the inclusion of students with disabilities in their regular PE classes. However, a lack of support from authorities and working under varied policies had become the main challenges of inclusion of students with disabilities in regular PE classes. It was also revealed that even though major revisions had been advocated in the education and training of PE teachers, disability-focused training was still segregated from many in-service teacher training programmes due to negligible attention by senior educators. Recommendations to re-invent and re-plan training of in-service PE teachers may facilitate successful integration of students with disabilities into the regular PE classes.