Attitudes towards diversity and educational inclusion of teachers in training

This paper presents the results of a study aimed at discovering the attitudes towards attention to diversity and educational inclusion of teachers in training and at identifying possible differences between them, depending on which year of the course they are on. To this end, we obtained the participation of 90 and 68 students on the first and final years respectively of the Degree in Infant and Primary Teaching at the University of Alicante’s Faculty of Education. Information was gathered via a questionnaire comprising five Likert-scale items and three open questions. A mixed methodological approach was used, with a descriptive and parametric analysis (Student’s t-test), using SPSS .21 and a content analysis, carried out with AQUAD 7 software. It can be deduced from the results that, generally speaking, attitudes towards diversity are favourable and similar among students from both years, with statistically significant differences being found as regards the type of schooling for students with special needs for educational support, and the positive impact attention to diversity has for the entire school community. These differences could be explained on the basis of discourse interpretation. Although, in both cases, attention to diversity is recognized as an essential task and the strengths of inclusive schooling are stressed, in the narratives of the final-year students a more practical and realistic view can be appreciated, which shows the distance that exists between theory and practice as regards inclusion. There is therefore a need to continue to work on the attitudes of teachers in training so that, with their future professional practice, they can close this distance