Building scaffolding for care: Teachers' discourse and the inclusion of children and adolescents with impairments

Abstract

Knowledge construction is dialogically and socio-historically driven and guided. This article aims at identifying discourses used by school teachers around the inclusion of students with disabilities. Twelve school teachers with more than five years' worth of experience were interviewed through a semi-structured tape recorded interview that focused on: students' educational histories, their diagnosis and treatment, their follow-up by hospital teachers, their motor and locomotor abilities, and the teaching-learning processes they were involved in. The transcribed interviews were analyzed from a dialogical perspective. The analysis focused on these topics: a) diagnosis; b) treatment; c) development-learning processes. The classroom teachers built meanings out of a conflict between old and new views of the development of students with neuromotor disorders. As our results show, contact between hospital and school teachers contributed to the understanding of the learning process.