Persons and affiliations

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Description

In 2006, the United Nations passed the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. This
Convention implements a general right for persons with disabilities to education, demanding an
inclusive approach at all levels of the educational system. The time Germany signed the Convention, a
review of its Educational System, concerning Inclusion, was initiated. Inclusion and heterogeneity are
controversial topics connected to concerns on side of teacher students and in-service teachers. Both
often do not feel prepared enough to teach in a lesson composed by students with special needs. In
order to prevent that, Inclusion needs to be more emphasised in teacher education programmes and
inclusive approaches need to be rethought and innovated. In my presentation, a specific focus will be
laid on the implementation of Inclusion as a cross-cutting issue among divers subjects and its
challenges. This leads me to my own research and teaching project “Teaching and Learning Space for
Inclusion “based at The Centre for Teacher Education and Educational Research of TU Dresden. In this
project, we created a common ground for inclusive education: a multifunctional classroom that is
adaptable to students‘ and teachers‘ needs. In order to test its applicability, we conducted several
projects, in which we let high school pupils and teacher students use the classroom to experiment and
practice with the innovative inclusive materials and settings, we are offering at site. Our aim is to raise
the awareness of teacher-students towards the fact, that Inclusion concerns all students, since all of
them have individual special educational needs, not just the ones who are labelled as such. Also, we
combine cross-cutting topics such as inclusion and digitalization in order to prevent the segregation of
the teacher training programme and to point out the potentials of the interweaving of these two
subjects. Therefore, we cooperate with various schools to create 360 degree videos of classroom
situations. With the help of these videos and by using VR-technology, school practices can be shown at
university. In this context, we also created, together with students, an Escape Room on the topic of
migration and education. This Serious Game is one of the projects I want to explain in my
presentation.