From Salamanca to PISA. The professionalisation of Special needs educators since 1990 from a comparative perspective

Since the end of the 20th century, the profession of Special Needs Educators (SNE) has internationally undergone significant changes.

On the one hand, SNEs are seen as facilitators of the vision of an inclusive school for all, as stated in the Salamanca declaration of 1994.

On the other hand, SNEs are supposed to support teachers in their work with the rapidly growing systems of educational standards and standard testing, partly due to the impact of the PISA program.

Since little is known about how these new task commitments have shaped the SNEs, this project aims to investigate the professionalization of SNEs since 1990 from a comparative and multidimensional perspective.

We compare Swedish and German teachers in terms of (a) their training and professional development concerning the profession’s body of knowledge and important sources; (b) their professions’ role, function, and body of knowledge in schools and school systems; (c) their professional autonomy in relation to different stakeholders in their schools and their national school systems.

In three studies, we investigate the process of professionalization by longitudinal, historical and internationally comparative methodologies, investigating educational, structural, behavioral, activity and ideological elements of Special Needs Educators´ professionalization.