Browsing by Author "Forsström, Petra"

Aims. According to statistics it seems that the amount of special educational needs have increased despite the Finnish education system's strive for inclusion. The aim of this study is to examine what sort of phenomenon inclusion is in speech of early childhood special education teachers' and which factors in their speech produce special educational needs particularly in a context of children on the autism spectrum. Research questions are: 1) What definitions are given to inclusion in speech of early childhood special education teachers' in a context of children on the autism spectrum? 2) What are the factors in speech of early childhood special education teachers' that produce special educational needs in a context of children on the autism spectrum? The goal of this study is also to participate in discussion of how factors producing difference and preventing inclusion in early childhood education can be disposed of and how to build more inclusive early childhood educational system. Methods. This study was carried out using theme interviews with five early childhood special education teachers' from Helsinki. The study material was analysed using abductive content analysis and was reflected to earlier literature about inclusion. Results and conclusions. The definitions given to inclusion were taking individual needs into account, rebuilding educational system, fulfilling individual rights, multiprofessional cooperation, cooperation with parents, participation, being accepted, neighborhood principle, learning in normal groups, learning in integrated special groups, and being in the same space physically. Integrated special groups were found to be as a good way of carrying out inclusion but that finding leads to the need for a redefinition of the concept of inclusion itself. The factors producing special educational needs were features of the autism spectrum disorder, attitudes of educators, insufficient resources, lack of competence of people working with children and psychobabble. The early childhood educational system also does not seem to be suitable for all children and the three-dimensional model of support does not always work as intended. Autism spectrum disorder itself was found to produce only a part of special ed-ucational needs whereas environment and current early childhood educational system were found to strongly produce special educational needs. In summary educators seem to be well aware of the ideal of inclusion at least in theoretical level but in practice early childhood educational system produces special educational needs and inclusion is not always achieved to the level aimed for. Instead of only concentrating on child's features in future there should be an increasing focus on how the whole early childhood educational system could improve.