Ideals and Realities of Inclusive Pedagogy-An Autoethnographic Reflection

Abstract

This thesis is an autoethnographic reflection of my inclusive practices during the fifteen years of my teaching experience as a teacher while an elementary teacher trainer. By reflecting and analysing through my critical incidents in the chapter “My Classroom Journeys” I tried to explore my differentiated strategies that I chose to support disabled children in order to reduce their learning barriers. In this study, I explored my attitudinal changes from a regular teacher to more an inclusive teacher. My attitude changed into an inclusive teacher. I noted my struggles in the classroom and the way I overcame them in the form of anecdotes. These anecdotes helped to solidify my ideas. My incidents most often were concerned with students’ understanding, classroom management, assessment, student behaviour, relationships with students, and student motivation. Real classrooms are no longer a homogeneous group because every child is different. Disability studies empowered me to have more awareness about the ideological aspects of inclusive pedagogy which I described in chapter 6. In this chapter I added the ‘Realities of My Inclusive Pedagogy’. Here I tried to uncover the genuineness of my classroom environment in the form of barriers that I experienced as an inclusive teacher while implementing my differentiated strategies. I hope that this study can increase our knowledge and understanding of the realities of inclusive pedagogy in the Indian context and it revealed the barriers that are affecting disabled children and their supports when they are in inclusive classrooms. I also hope that by telling my stories, the readers of this autoethnography, particularly the teaching community, can connect and slowly change their perceptions towards disabled children more positively in the inclusive classroom with the overall goal of removing existing barriers.