Konteksty Pedagogiczne (Dec 2020)
The Student through Bronfenbrenner’s “Glasses” – Teachers’ Knowledge of Students with Special Educational Needs from a Micro- and Mesosystemic Perspective
Abstract
As systematically published statistical data show, 67% of students with special educational needs attend public and integrated schools in Poland. This means that every – or close to every – teacher meets in their professional career students with diverse development conditions or learning disabilities that create special educational needs. For the effective organization of the education process of these students, it is crucial not only to gain knowledge about the characteristics of the students themselves, but also about the environment of their upbringing, as well as interactions between the basic microsystems in which the students are “nested.” This article presents the results of in-depth ethnographic interviews conducted with twelve teachers, the purpose of which was to gain insight into what knowledge about the development and functioning of specific students with special educational needs is declared by the surveyed pedagogues. As the basic theoretical framework, I used Urie Bronfenbrenner’s theory of bioecological human development, which captures human development in concen-trically arranged systems: the micro-, meso-, exo-, macro- and chronosystem. In this article, I presented data on the teachers’ declared knowledge from the micro- and mesosystemic per-spective. The results of the conducted research indicate that the surveyed teachers often have incomplete and sometimes even incorrect knowledge about their students with special educational needs, use similar methods of supporting students despite their diverse needs, and regularly leave most of the support activities for support teachers, seeing their own roles primarily as leading teachers.
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