Özet:
Inclusive education (IE) has been recognized as a key strategy to ensure education
for all in the developing world for the last two decades. As a developing country,
Bangladesh is striving to address IE by undergoing various initiatives such as
policy reform, awareness creation and teacher development. This paper based on a
qualitative approach attempts to explore pre-service teachers’ responses to include
students with special educational needs (SEN) in regular classrooms in primary
schools. A one-on-one interview was conducted with 20 pre-service teachers who
were enrolled in a teacher education program of one public university in
Bangladesh. The findings revealed from the study indicate that majority of the preservice teachers have unfavourable attitudes to include students with SEN in
regular classrooms. Misconception and lack of knowledge about disabilities are
revealed from most of the pre-service teachers’ responses. Further large class size,
high workloads, inflexible curriculum policy of primary education and inadequate
experiential learning facilities of teacher education program are identified as
barriers to IE reform. Several issues are discussed as implications in order to
promote better inclusive practices in regular primary education.
