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This study explores teacher talk in the early phase of a project in a Norwegian elementary school where Lesson Study is used as a method for professional development. The study focuses on inclusion and aims to explore what beliefs about student needs and teacher role and responsibilities become evident, and how these beliefs can challenge development towards a more inclusive practice. To this end, content analysis is applied to audio recordings of teacher teams’ planning meetings. Despite an overall positive attitude towards inclusion, and inclusive structures in the school, findings point at factors in teachers’ beliefs that can challenge the inclusion process. These factors are: student needs understood as individual problems, adaptation understood as individualised and laborious and a limited view on teacher role, where their responsibility mainly regard academic learning.

The Salamanca Statement is a primary point of departure in research and policy on inclusive education. However, several problems have surfaced in the 25 years since its publication. In particular, several different interpretations of the concept of inclusive education and its enactment in practice have arisen. For instance, the definition of the pupil groups in focus varies greatly. There are also varying definitions of the importance of pupil-placement, when it comes to organisation of inclusive education. Using a theoretical framework combining Bacchi’s [1999. Women, Policy and Politics. The Construction of Policy Problems. London: Sage Publications] poststructural policy-analysis and concepts from Popkewitz [2009. “Curriculum Study, Curriculum History, and Curriculum Theory: The Reason of Reason.” Journal of Curriculum Studies 41 (3): 301–319. doi:10.1080/00220270902777021], this article illustrates that The Salamanca Statement allows for a variety of interpretations of inclusion. As a policy-concept, inclusion encompasses an amalgam of political ideals, including welfare-state ideals where education is viewed as a public-good, as well as market-ideals of education as a private-good. Policies of inclusion also define the desired citizen, through categories of disadvantaged children, the ones excluded but to be included for their own good as well as for the good of the future society. The conclusions are that researchers and policy-makers should elucidate what they mean by inclusion with for instance moral- and practical arguments rather than vague references to The Salamanca Statement.

Knowledge is scarce on parental satisfaction with the inclusion of children with disabilities in physical education (PE). This study explored how parents’ satisfaction with inclusion in PE was associated with parental and child interpersonal and intrapersonal characteristics. Seventy-two parents of children with disabilities participated in the survey-based study. The results of the ordinary least square regression (OLS) and quantile regression (QR) indicated that the parents’ satisfaction with social inclusion in PE was associated with their attitudes towards inclusion in PE, perceived PE-related information sharing, and the type of disability and degree of physical inclusion. Parents’ satisfaction with pedagogical inclusion of children in PE was associated with their attitudes towards inclusion in PE, PE-related information sharing, and the children’s degrees of disability and physical inclusion. Furthermore, the QR estimates indicated that the explanatory strength of parental attitudes towards inclusion in PE varied with the degree of parental satisfaction with social and pedagogical inclusion of their children in PE. Practical and methodological implications of the findings are discussed.

Amidst major new initiatives in research that are beginning to address the pedagogic dimension of building capacity in social science research methods, this paper makes the first move to apply the lens of inclusive pedagogy to research methods pedagogy. The paper explores the ways in which learning social science research methods is hard and may be anxiety-provoking, which has sometimes led to a deficit discourse in which learners are positioned as ill-prepared and fearful. Learners can then be blamed for being hard to teach when an inclusive pedagogical lens would support a more asset-based discourse. Nonetheless, the authors argue that without traditional deficit-based solutions of the remedial class, special needs label or special teacher within the methods learning environment, methods teachers have developed their own responses. These pedagogic responses, elicited from the authors’ research using methods of expert interviews, focus groups and video-stimulated dialogue, address challenges associated with the learner, the learning material and the teacher’s context. The paper differentiates between practical solution-focused strategies and more holistic approaches. The authors illustrate how methods teachers reach out to diverse learners and they conclude that data and standpoints are used in inclusive teaching to make connections and to support learning.