Suggestions for a Teacher Training Program for Inclusive Education in a Japanese University

Copyright © 2013 Junichi Takahashi. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons At-tribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Inclusive education has been recently proposed in primary and secondary educations in many countries. Children who need special education support should be educated together with typically developing chil-dren in general classes. Although many studies have examined the effectiveness of inclusive education, researchers have pointed out that some general education teachers experience problems in their relation-ships with children who have disabilities such as developmental disorders and intellectual disabilities. In this paper, we review teacher training programs in a Japanese university and offer suggestions to enhance teachers ’ relationships with disabled children. In our discussion, we focused on adult attachment theory, which is an affective connection and interactions between self and others. First, we reviewed the impor-tance of teachers ’ relationships with disabled children. Second, we reviewed attachment theories with re-spect to the quality of teacher-child relationships, and lastly, we proposed that adult attachment theory is a mediator in the quality of teacher-child relationships. We proposed a direction for the application of these conceptual assumptions to the teacher-training program for inclusive education in a Japanese university