General Education Teachers in the United Arab Emirates and Their Acceptance of the Inclusion of Students with Disabilities

Abstract

In this article, Dr Emad M. Alghazo and Dr Eman El. Naggar Gaad, both assistant professors at the Department of Special Education in the United Arab Emirates University, report on their research into the attitudes of mainstream teachers towards the inclusion of students with disabilities. The research took place in the Emirate of Abu‐Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, and set out to explore the extent to which general education teachers there accept the inclusion of students with disabilities in mainstream classrooms. The research process incorporated a questionnaire survey, analysed quantitatively, and a series of interviews with teachers to follow up on a range of issues. The analysis of the results takes account of a number of variables, including the gender of the respondents; number of years' experience as a teacher; and type of learner disability. Emad Alghazo and Eman Naggar Gaad report that there is more work to be done on the development of an ‘inclusion culture’ among teachers in the United Arab Emirates. They close their article by making a series of recommendations for future practice focusing on initial teacher education, continuing professional development and attitudinal change.

Greek Teachers’ Attitudes toward the Inclusion of Students with Special Educational Needs

“…Regarding the issue of gender, the study showed that women were more supportive towards the inclusion of special educational needs students than men, result that is in accordance with previous studies [3,41,44,42,62].…”

“…Teaching these students demands a higher level of preparation and specialised planning for the implementation of special education goals [3].…”

Inclusive education in Spain: how do skills, resources, and supports affect regular education teachers’ perceptions of inclusion?

“…Some works conclude that secondary education teachers have less positive attitudes towards inclusion than their colleagues from kindergarten and elementary school (Avissar, Reiter, and Leyser 2003), while other studies did not find significant differences between teachers from different grade levels (Avramidis, Bayliss and Burden 2000; variable gender is taken into account. Some studies state that female teachers are more tolerant towards inclusion than male teachers (Alghazo and Naggar Gaad 2004;Hutzler, Zach, and Gafni 2005), but others (Batsiou et al 2008;Cardona 2011) found no association between gender and teacher perceptions of inclusion.…”

Trainee Teachers’ Attitudes Towards Students With Specific Learning Disabilities

“…For example, Loreman and colleagues (2005) found that teachers were mixed in their attitudes towards students with diverse needs and abilities with the least positive response towards students with behaviour, and particularly physically aggressive behaviour problems. Moreover, Alghazo and Gaad (2004), and Englebrecht and colleagues (2003), concluded from their studies that teachers found students with an intellectual disability as being more difficult to support than students with other types of disabilities. Dupoux, Wolman and Estrada (2005) compared the attitudes of teachers toward inclusion of students with diverse needs and abilities in Haïti and the United States.…”