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Sweden is internationally regarded as an inclusive educational system. This study explores how teacher education programmes in Sweden have been organised as regards inclusive education (IE). Specifically, the study examines how teacher candidates and staff perceive teacher pre-service training for IE in terms of its curriculum and pedagogical practices towards students. The question was explored through a case-study of a large, well-respected university in Sweden, using semi-structured interviews and group-discussions with teacher candidates and staff members, and document analyses. The study revealed that the university makes several purposeful efforts to prepare its teacher candidates to practise IE, e.g. all teacher education programmes have a specific course on inclusion, while this content is also infused into several other courses. Nonetheless, the study also demonstrates that teacher candidates lack a deeper understanding of relationship between special education and inclusion, which can probably be attributed to the wider socio-political context dominated by the special education narrative.

This article is a literature review of academic articles in the educational sciences published in the International Journal of Inclusive Education between 2013 and 2023, focusing thematically on the political, social, and conceptual-theoretical dimensions of inclusive education. Its aim is to explicitly connect educational sciences and sociology by examining research outputs in the field of inclusive education arising from educational sciences, which address the reproduction of inequalities and discrimination at the systemic social level. It focuses on the question of the societal and political implications of the concept of inclusive education. In doing so, it highlights the barriers at the societal level to the implementation of inclusive education in the form of the dominant deficit-focused perception of children experiencing educational difficulties; the lack of transdisciplinary and intersectoral cooperation; and neoliberal values such as competitiveness and individualism leading to the segregation of children with poorer educational outcomes. It concludes by pointing out some problematic aspects of the concept of inclusive education for a broader social and political change. Additionally, it argues that the implementation of inclusive education can only be sustainable if it includes broader social change beyond the field of education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The academic literature on the practice of inclusive education presents diverse and at times contradictory perspectives in how it is connected to practices of distributed leadership. Depending on the approach, on the one hand, inclusive educational practice may enable distributed school leadership, while on the other hand, it may allow for hierarchical management styles if staff members do not implement inclusive practices. This paper explores how school staff members perceive and understand the relationship between practices of inclusive education and distributed leadership in two public primary schools: one in New South Wales (Australia) and one in Slovakia. These two schools were identified by external informants as good practice examples of inclusive education. Using qualitative research methods based on interviews, this paper identifies two main understandings of this relationship. First, although distributed leadership may encourage the goals of inclusive education, it may in some circumstances also hinder their achievement. Second, distributed leadership can be constructed as an indispensable component of inclusive education, and this has implications for how the target groups of inclusive education are conceptualised. This paper also discusses the wider social and political contexts of the two primary schools and how in each case context significantly constrained and shaped understandings and practices of inclusion and distributed leadership in the practice of teachers and principals.

There exists no legal or academic consensus as to whether children's access to sex education should be considered a human right. This study aimed to ascertain (1) how young people in Slovakia perceive sex education in terms of their human right to information, and (2) which areas sex education should covered to fulfil their right to information. To address these two research questions, we conducted a quantitative study whose design was informed by the Standards for Sexuality Education in Europe. A representative sample of 1,015 secondary school students in Slovakia completed a questionnaire between September and October 2017. The results showed that young people generally held positive attitudes towards sex education. Nonetheless, respondents who had experienced sexual intercourse, those who had attended sex education classes, and those who had attended Ethics rather than Religious Education classes had significantly more positive attitudes towards sex education than others. Young people were most interested in the bodily, psychological and relational aspects of sexuality, while they were least interested in the social and cultural dimensions. These findings have important implications for educational policy and practice with respect to the provision of school-based sex education in Slovakia.

Based on a social constructivist theoretical framework, this research study examines how the design of proinclusive educational policies and the general public construct the Roma students and parents in Slovakia. For this purpose, data from two selected educational policies and five focus groups conducted in five regions in Slovakia were analyzed. The findings demonstrate that the Roma are constructed negatively as irresponsible dependents and deviants not valuing education and incapable of making wise decisions about their lives. These findings can be considered relevant for policy formulation processes because proinclusive policies may sabotage their own goals if negative social constructions of a certain societal group are embedded in them.

The concept of distributed leadership has been widely accepted and scrutinised in research and practice since the beginning of the new millennium. Nonetheless, there is a lack of academic research on how school staff members perceive the term and to what extent they are willing to employ it as part of their daily practices. This article aims to explore these understandings and attitudes in two public primary schools--one in New South Wales (Australia) and one in Slovakia--whilst using qualitative research methods based on semi-structured interviews with staff members. The findings of this study reveal that participants often present very contradictory attitudes towards employing distributed leadership in practice. On the one hand, they require maximising the processes of distributed leadership and, on the other hand, they welcome various instances of solo/autocratic leadership practices by the principal. They also often conflated the concepts of distributed leadership and democratic leadership. In addition, the article discusses how wider social and political context may shape these perceptions and attitudes towards distributed leadership.

The fall of Communist regime in 1989 and the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1993 significantly affected the educational system of today's Slovakia. As a sovereign state, Slovakia has ratified the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities obliging its signatories to practise "inclusive education." This article explores the current educational policies of the Slovak Republic in light of this obligation. Using the official statistical data the article argues that the current state educational policies have not succeeded in meeting the objective of practising inclusive education, as the proportion of students educated in segregated special educational provisions has been consistently rising over the last decade. This article attempts to identify particular aspects of the current educational policies which might have contributed to this phenomenon.

Researchers' "reflexivity" about how they shape the phenomena that they study within the data collection process is often presented as a crucial component of ethnographic research methodology. Nevertheless, academic literature about ethnography is mostly silent around whether researchers' dreams are relevant to the research process and their interpretation can be considered a valuable material to be "reflexive" of. While using data from an ethnographic study in two public primary schools in Australia and Slovakia about inclusive education and school leadership, this paper demonstrates how researcher's dreams and their interpretation navigated his decisions about the data collection process, data analysis and ethical aspects of the study. This paper presents original implications for understanding the concept of "reflexivity" and putting it in practice when employing ethnographic research methodology.

This article explores hate speech against the Roma in Slovakia on Facebook between April 2016 and January 2017 and the impact of fact-checking and personal experience strategies in countering hate speech through a quasi-experimental research design. It examines how the Roma were constructed and how discussion participants reacted to our pro-Roma interventions. The research sample consisted of 60 Facebook discussions (with more than 7,500 comments) on Roma-related topics posted by the profiles of various members of the Slovak Parliament and the most popular online news media outlets. Qualitative content analysis revealed that the Roma in Facebook discussions were constructed primarily in a negative sense, as asocial criminals misusing welfare benefits. This study demonstrated that Facebook discussion participants presenting anti-Roma attitudes did not use any research evidence to support their constructions. It also demonstrated that pro-Roma comments encouraged other participants with a pro-Roma attitude to become involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]