Comparative Analysis of the Development of Inclusive Teacher Education System on the Example of the USA and Canada

The relevance of the study is conditioned by the growing number of children with special educational needs, which necessitates forming a proper Ukrainian system of inclusive education and training of future teachers in accordance with international standards. The purpose of the study is to identify the features of the development of the teacher education system for improving inclusion in the United States and Canada in the context of a historical retrospective. To obtain new knowledge, the author applied methods of analysis, synthesis, comparison, and generalisation. The article describes in a chronological context the development of teacher education in the United States and Canada to improve teachers’ readiness to provide high-quality education to all children in a mainstream school environment. Attention is focused on the importance of the “general education initiative”, which prohibited the distinction between general and special education in the United States and regulated the mandatory special training of “inclusive teachers”. It was discovered that the US Federal Government expects teachers of a general education school to be responsible for teaching children with disabilities, and requires constant revision of the qualification characteristics of a teacher of a general education mainstream school. The differences in the development of the Canadian teacher education system are described on the example of the provinces of Ontario and Saskatchewan, which are generated by the recommendatory form of state initiatives of the provinces of Canada to develop inclusive education. The practical value of the study is to determine the key characteristics of the development and establishment of pedagogical inclusive education in the USA and Canada, based on which further methodological and practical improvement of the Ukrainian education system is possible