Teachers in inclusive classrooms in China : their views on systemic challenges and opportunities

Abstract

Inclusive education is becoming more and more popular in the world, since inclusive education is believed to be better learning opportunity in common educational setting, together with the spread of its appreciation of the good values of inclusion, equality, fairness and non-discrimination. This tendency has blown to China since its open-up to the world in late 1970s and the Chinese form of inclusive education, which is commonly known as Learning in Regular Classrooms (LRC) has now become the main approach to satisfying educational needs of students with disabilities. However, Chinese LRC is originally based on a pragmatic thinking to provide more students with disabilities with quality education, due to the fact that there are not enough special schools for a huge population of children and adolescents with disabilities. The country and its competent authorities have made a bunch of policies to support and promote the development of LRC, however, the practice is not always consistent with what is written in documents. Furthermore, unique Chinese culture and different local traditions and actualities decide that the development of inclusive education in China has to go along with its own characteristics. This thesis tries to describe the current situation of inclusive education in Beijing through in-service inclusive teachers’ perspectives, so as to provide an angle to learn the overall developmental situation of inclusive education in China. The research reveals Beijing teachers’ perspectives on inclusive education, their opinions, concerns and expectations, which are categorised into four main groups – parental, classroom-based, administrative and personal. The results turned out that Beijing teachers in inclusive classrooms were properly supported, while they were showing their expectation on more support. It also turned out they had specific concerns in parental issues, which was quite different from teachers in western countries.