Teachers’ social representations of students with disabilities and school inclusion in lower secondary education

Abstract

This article, drawn from a professional master’s thesis in Teaching Practices in Primary Education, aimed to identify and analyse the social representations held by lower secondary school teachers at a municipal school in Santos, state of São Paulo, Brazil, regarding students with disabilities, and to understand how these constructions bear upon pedagogical practice and school inclusion. The guiding question was: how does the mainstream teacher see the student with a disability in the classroom, and how does this view bear upon their practice and upon school inclusion? The study is grounded in Serge Moscovici’s Theory of Social Representations and in the processes of anchoring and objectification, articulated with debates on the medicalisation of education and on the paradigms of special education. This qualitative field study was conducted with ten teachers from different curricular subjects, through an identification questionnaire and semi-structured interviews, submitted to Laurence Bardin’s Content Analysis. Four categories emerged: the teacher’s view of inclusion, the outsourcing of teaching, the centrality of medical diagnoses, and learning framed as deficit. The findings indicate the persistence of representations marked by non-belonging, homogenisation and the pathologisation of not learning, which materialise as attitudinal barriers. It is concluded that effective inclusive practices require confronting these representations and adopting strategies guided by Universal Design for Learning, Collaborative Teaching and the Individualised Education Plan.