INTERNATIONAL APPROACHES TO INCLUSION OF CHILDREN WITH SPECIAL EDUCATIONAL NEEDS IN MAINSTREAM EDUCATION

Inclusion of children with special educational needs in mainstream education is a very complex issue which has been in the focus of specialists from several fields, such as psychology, pedagogy, sociology, medicine, social work in recent years. A great number of documents that address this issue have also been adopted. Probably the best known one is ”The Salamanca Statement and Framework for Action on Special Needs Education”, adopted by the World Conference on Special Needs Education: Access and Quality, organized by UNESCO in Salamanca, Spain, 7-10 June 1994. This document underlined for the first time the importance of inclusive school. By being opened to all children, regardless of their problems, an ordinary school with inclusive view is the most efficient way of fighting against discrimination. The process is by no means an easy one, as not all children in a class are willing to recognize and accept difference as normality. In addition, the success of inclusion of children with special educational needs also depends on the way they are accepted by the larger community they live in, which includes besides classmates, family members and teachers as well. Starting from theoretic aspects, in this paper we intend to present our international scientific research that we conducted during the 2009-2010 academic year in some ordinary schools from Romania, Spain, Poland and Italy. The main objective was to understand to which extent schoolchildren with different disabilities were integrated in ordinary classes and how deeply they were accepted from social point of view by their classmates. The representative sample included 800 children, with or without special educational needs, from the countries mentioned above. The research instrument we used was a sociometric test that asked children to express their preferences about their classmates based on different criteria. The results showed us that a great number of non-disabled children were inadequately prepared to accept their disabled classmates and this can be a major obstacle for the latter ones' effective inclusion in mainstream education.