Social and Educational Barriers to Inclusive Education of Individuals with Special Health Needs

Inclusive education development has objectified new tasks for teachers on the individualization of training and upbringing learners with special health needs. At the same time, significant efforts have been made by the pedagogical community to solve these tasks causing challenges for teachers, increasing the risks of inclusive education and reducing the quality of students’ achievements. Studying the barriers in teachers’ perceptions of the inclusive education and its principles, on the one hand, and teachers’ professional difficulties in implementing inclusive practices, on the other hand, is an urgent research task that has both theoretical and practical meaning. This article is aimed at identifying and classifying professional difficulties that create social and educational barriers to the development of inclusive practices. The key research method is the pedagogical dialogue with the expert, developed by the authors of the article. The research involved 110 teachers of general education institutions of the Murmansk region. This method allowed experts to objectify the teachers’ difficulties both mental and practical in relation to their implementation of inclusive educational practices. The results are presented by identifying, describing and classifying the professional difficulties of teachers in inclusive education, due to the social and educational context, as well as highlighting the contradictions in the essence of these difficulties. The research results allow predicting the risks of inclusive education in the inclusion itself, keeping the learners with special health needs within the educational activities, together with peers with healthy development, and developing the effective ways to resolve problem situations.