SELF-MANAGEMENT OF KNOWLEDGE AND PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICES: BELIEFS ABOUT INCLUSIVE EDUCATION IN EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATORS IN CHILE

Since the 19th century, Chile has declared the need and obligation to provide full school coverage to all people. A century later, the integration model emerged publicly starting a slow and bumpy road from Disability to Special Educational Needs (SEN) and therefore to the long-awaited Inclusion. Although several normative educational policies have been installed-as is the case of Decree 83/2015-, and the mandatory use and implementation of the methodology called Universal Design for Learning -DUA-for all national schools, the process of transformation of the educational system has presented important limitations due to the prevalence of beliefs and pedagogical practices within the institutions. To overcome these limitations, it has been highlighted the urgent need to deploy new strategies that require Early Childhood Education (EP) and Basic Education (EGB) teachers to implement practices consistent with what is expected by these regulatory requirements. These practices must be multifaceted and based on the diversity present in their courses and subjects, designing curricular adjustments based on the DUA methodology linked to Law and School Inclusion by decree. Based on the above, and in view of the scarce existing evidence, it was established as a starting point to know the beliefs of early childhood educators about the pedagogical practices that should be implemented to ensure inclusive education. Beliefs were chosen because of their initial condition of knowledge for the construction of solutions based on uncertainty, a matter that is proposed as a research assumption, in the understanding that initial teacher training in PE is neither adequate nor sufficient to provide pedagogical coverage to this problem, which is why-and in conjunction with the problem described here-, suggests the use of this psychological process as a way to solve problems. The results of a qualitative research whose objective was to know the beliefs of early childhood educators about the pedagogical practices that should be implemented to guarantee an inclusive education are presented. Fourteen nursery schoolteachers from a commune of Santiago de Chile participated in the study, with whom in-depth interviews were carried out to produce information based on their experience regarding inclusive education and its development in the early education classroom. The analysis of the information was carried out by means of Content Analysis. The main findings point to the deployment of practices based mainly on their beliefs about what inclusion implies, which are self-managed by themselves due to the perception of a low level of initial teacher training and education in their university institutions of origin. These beliefs consolidate practices that surround what is described in the literature regarding the ambiguity of the concept of inclusion and its curricular descent in the regular classroom.