The Role of Teachers in Implementing Inclusive Education in Basic Schools in Kurdistan Region-Iraq

This study is conducted to investigate the teachers’ attitudes toward inclusive education. The participants are teachers from primary schools who have at least one student with special needs learning within the ordinary class. The study aims to clarify the teachers’ attitudes toward inclusive education and to identify the difficulties of implementing inclusive education, in addition, to showing the role of regular and special education teachers in promoting inclusive education. To achieve the aims of the study, it is worth eliciting the answers from the teachers’ feelings towards inclusive education and finding the challenges faced in the implementation of inclusive education in the basic schools in the city of Duhok. The study structure is based on both primary and secondary sources. The first one is a questionnaire used to collect data from the teachers’ opinions and attitudes, and the second one is the sources from various books, journals, and research articles related to inclusive education. The study also includes the views and thoughts of the researchers as they have experiences in the field. This study has tried to provide some information regarding teachers’ perceptions, challenges, and concerns about implementing Inclusive education in the basic schools in the Kurdistan region. An integrative questionnaire is used as a study design to investigate the teachers’ attitudes. 15 teachers have responded to the questionnaire, namely 8 inclusive education teachers, and 7 regular teachers. These samples are taken by using systematic random sampling to give a fair and equal chance of selection for both types of teachers. The findings indicate that even though some opportunities support inclusive education, regular teachers do not support the idea of having students with disabilities in their classes. The regular teachers do not feel comfortable having students with disabilities in their classes. Consequently, there is a challenge to impede the implementation of inclusive education. Overall, it can be concluded that the teachers lack the awareness, knowledge, and adequate training to be supportive of inclusive education.