Attitudes of Teachers from Mainstream Schools to Education Including Children with Disabilities

The article presents a study whose aim was to learn the attitudes of teachers of upper elementary grades from mainstream schools to education including students with disabilities. It was also an attempt to learn their opinions on the chances and limitations of implementing inclusive assumptions in educational practice as well as their needs and expected support in the performance of professional tasks related to teaching students with disabilities. The study involved 145 teachers of grades 4-8 of elementary schools. The following research tools were used: The Scale of Teachers’ Attitudes to Inclusive Education, developed on the basis of the Survey of Attitudes Toward the Inclusion of Students with Special Needs by M.A. Winzer (Polish adaptation by W. Pilecka & J. Kossewska), and a survey questionnaire for teachers. The obtained results show that many teachers approach skeptically the new solutions in education for students with disabilities. Their ambiguous or negative attitude to inclusive education corresponds to the sense of lack of proper preparation to teaching students with disabilities and a critical assessment of the state of readiness of mainstream schools (both in formal and social/mental terms) to the implementation of educational inclusion assumptions.