Michelle Proyer’s research while affiliated with University of Vienna and other places

In order to prepare foreign language teachers for successful inclusive teaching, particularly from a subject-specific perspective, there is a need for suitable formats for teacher education to be developed and evaluated. The project ELLeN (English Language Learning & Neurodiversity, http://ellen-project.eu/) applied an inquiry-based learning (IBL) and participatory approach to base pre-service teachers’ learning on first-person narratives of neurodivergent individuals’ and professionals’ experiences in inclusive education. In this interdisciplinary project, pre-service teachers were introduced to the principles of inclusive teaching and neurodiversity through the format of IBL. Supported by multimodal and multi-perspective materials, they prepared tasks on neurodiversity and the implementation of qualitative interviews and their analysis. To investigate the development of their attitudes and perceived competence growth regarding neurodiversity-inclusive English teaching, we employed questionnaires, written reflections and focus group interviews. Results show that a focused IBL approach can help strengthen prospective teachers in seeing inclusive EFL teaching as feasible and enriching.

This paper takes on the important concepts of inclusion and sustainability, in both their broad and discursive understandings, to map out the interrelations that teachers, who work within different areas of the Austrian school system, make between different, key aspects of their work and organization. The complex intersections of school organization, sustainability, and inclusion were analyzed following a situational analysis approach that made use of different types of mapping (e.g., messy, situational, positional) of data gathered from semi-structured interviews with a teacher-training student and teachers positioned across the Austrian school system, some of whom with experience in classrooms with, for example, refugee, d/Deaf, and neurodivergent students. The findings from these data display ways of being oriented towards sustainable and responsible as well as inclusive engagement, especially within educational spheres. By and large, what emerged from the data was the clear result that school organization as a whole plays one of the biggest roles in determining whether or not non-mandatory subjects such as “sustainability” are given space and time in the classroom. Therefore, if we want to promote topics on sustainability and a focus on climate justice in education, efforts need to be made to bring these topics into the official curriculum.