Preparing teachers for inclusive classrooms - Learning from a collaborative inquiry group

Designing preservice teacher education partially around voluntary study groups offers teacher educators a unique chance to examine group members' perspectives and understandings. This article examines the topics of concern and questions expressed by six general education student teachers in a collaborative dialogue group focused on inclusive classrooms. Culled from seven meeting transcripts over the course of one semester, we extracted the themes of inexperience, equity, levels, normalcy, labels, and belonging as presented by these teachers in their individual inquiries into inclusive education. We consider how useful the themes, tensions, and issues unearthed in this research are for constructing a preservice teacher education curriculum for inclusive teacher preparation.