Managing Children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities: Pre-Service Teachers’ Perceptions on Collaboration Between Professionals and Parents

Abstract

The paper sought to determine the perceptions Colleges of Education tutors hold on how the current curriculum helps pre-service teachers to collaborate with other professionals and parents to manage children with special educational needs and disabilities for effective inclusive education in Ghana. A descriptive survey design was adopted using a sample of 235 tutors from 13 public Colleges of Education in Ghana. The lottery method was used to select four out of the sixteen regions in Ghana and the purposive sampling technique was used to select all the Colleges within the four regions, while convenience sampling technique was used to select the actual respondents for the study. Questionnaire was used to gather the research data. Percentages and frequencies were used as statistical tools to analyse the data. The findings revealed that pre-service teachers had difficulties collaborating with other professionals and parents in managing children with special educational needs and disabilities in the inclusive classroom. It was therefore, recommended that measures that could help pre-service teachers to effectively and efficiently collaborate with parents and other professionals should be put in place.

Keywords:Collaboration, Perceptions, Inclusive Education, Pre-service teachers, Children with Special Educational Needs.

DOI: 10.7176/RHSS/11-20-07

Publication date:October 31^st 2021