Understanding teaching practices for inclusive participation of students with autism in Saudi Arabian primary schools

Research indicates that students with autism tend to show more levels of non-engagement compared to their peers with other types of disabilities, and teachers struggle to enhance their participation in mainstream classrooms. The aim of this paper was to understand how teachers arrive at their teaching decisions to promote the participation of students with autism in inclusive classrooms by illustrating and analysing the phenomenon across several cases. This study adopted a longitudinal multiple case study design with four participating teachers from primary schools in Saudi Arabia using a combination of methods (observations, interviews and teaching efficacy scale). The findings indicated that teachers arrived at their teaching decisions regarding the participation of students with autism in a complex way of thinking involving attitudes towards the inclusion of students with autism, levels of teaching efficacy, perceived causes of the students’ needs and expectations of students’ learning progress in their classrooms. A model grounded in the data was developed to show how these factors interact. Teachers who perceived students with autism as having intellectual difficulties, had lower expectations of their learning progress, lower level of teaching efficacy and less positive attitudes towards their inclusion, which set limits on their participation in the class.