Education for all in action: Measuring teachers’ competences for inclusive education

RESEARCH ARTICLE Education for all in action: Measuring teachers’ competences for inclusive education Wendelien VantieghemID1*, Iris Roose2, Karin Goosen1, Wouter Schelfhout3, Piet Van Avermaet1 1 Centre for Diversity & Learning, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium, 2 Human & society, Artevelde University College, Ghent, Belgium, 3 Antwerp School of Education, University of Antwerp, Antwerpen, Belgium * wendelien.vantieghem@ugent.be Abstract While inclusive education has achieved international importance, there is no valid instru- ment to measure teachers’ competences in creating quality classrooms for diverse learners, which this study aims to remedy. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses with 975 pre- service teachers and 600 in-service teachers were used. Central to teachers’ inclusive teaching competency is both beliefs and efficacy. Results show that teachers hold profes- sional beliefs on student diversity, organized in four factors mapping unto axes of diversity (specifically ethnicity, disability, SES, and gender & sexuality). Teachers also hold beliefs on the responsibility of the educational field to create inclusion, organized in three factors: gen- eral school policy, initiatives geared specifically towards ethnic minority students, and initia- tives for students with a disability. Furthermore, the results show five factors related to self- efficacy: noticing student diversity, enabling high-quality student-interactions, creating stim- ulating learning environments, collaborating with colleagues and diverse parents. The facto-

rial structure and scale-scores are discussed for what they unveil of teachers’ thinking about diversity in the classroom. Introduction Nowadays, due to the expansion of education, migration flows, and various policy initiatives, classrooms are becoming increasingly diverse [1,2]. At the same time, the pursuit of inclusive education is influencing policy agendas of countries across the globe [3,4]. While inclusion was initially focused on groups traditionally occupying a marginalized position in education (including students with disabilities, from ethnic minority descent or low-SES families), inclu- sive education is currently conceptualised as a call to transform educational systems at large to reach all students regardless of their background [for a detailed discussion of the evolution of the concept of inclusive education, see 5]. This perspective on inclusion explicitly starts from a social justice standpoint and is known as Education for All (EfA) [6]. Important within this view is the recognition of the educational fields’ responsibility to take into account differences between learners in order to create qualitative learning environments for everyone, while PLOS ONE PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0291033 November 8, 2023 1 / 22 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Vantieghem W, Roose I, Goosen K, Schelfhout W, Van Avermaet P (2023) Education for all in action: Measuring teachers’ competences for inclusive education. PLoS ONE 18(11): e0291033. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0291033

Editor: Pieter-Paul Verhaeghe, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, BELGIUM Received: November 28, 2022 Accepted: August 18, 2023 Published: November 8, 2023 Peer Review History: PLOS recognizes the benefits of transparency in the peer review process; therefore, we enable the publication of all of the content of peer review and author responses alongside final, published articles. The editorial history of this article is available here: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0291033 Copyright: © 2023 Vantieghem et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: The datasets used in the research have been made publicly available via Zenodo. A reference to these datasets is included in the Methodology: Sample & respondents; and the