Inclusive education and interdisciplinary approaches to the environment, pedagogical support, and social development: a systematic review

Background and Study Aim. Inclusive education is increasingly regarded as a priority for ensuring equal opportunities for learning and development among all participants in the educational process. Despite growing attention, inclusive education still lacks interdisciplinary integration, particularly in spatial and pedagogical dimensions. The aim of this study is to systematize the thematic structure of contemporary literature on inclusive education using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) modeling. Materials and Methods. The Web of Science database was used in this study. The search covered the past five years and included only English-language articles. An initial keyword search yielded 791 publications, from which 661 were extracted. The PRISMA 2020 methodology and LDA modeling were applied to these 661 publications to identify thematic clusters (topics). The optimal LDA model featured the following parameters: coherence score = 0.4467, perplexity = –7.0425. Data processing of the extracted documents was carried out in the PyCharm environment using custom Python scripts. Results. It was identified terms typical for environmental design (n = 62), inclusive and educational environments (n = 85). It was excluded terms used in non-relevant contexts (n = 10). Based on the extracted terms and 661 documents, a set of single words (n = 50) and word pairs (n = 225) with their respective weights was created. Using the WeightedPairCount metric, 29 of the most relevant publications were selected. Pedagogical support was the most frequently discussed topic (41.4% of the sample), followed by environmental design (27.6%), emotional development (17.2%), and assessment tools (13.8%). For each area, current challenges, barriers, and promising approaches were identified. Conclusions. The systematization of current research on inclusive education enables the structuring of accumulated academic knowledge and highlights existing gaps. Future studies should prioritize interdisciplinary approaches that integrate pedagogical, environmental, and technological components.