Comparing Inclusive Education Teachers' Struggles in Italy and China

This exploratory study is a cross-cultural comparative analysis of understanding inclusive education in Italy and China. The exploratory study aims to explore teachers' understanding of inclusive in Italian and Chinese context. Given that aim, a historical perspective is employed to understand the historical policy evolution of inclusive education in Italy and China and to carefully examine how inclusive education policy was issued in different history periods and how these inclusive education policies influenced the school practice. Particularly, based on the understanding of inclusive education in government policy and school teachers' day-to-day school practice, the present exploratory study wants to enrich our knowledge of "how to make education more inclusive" from a cross-cultural comparative perspective. In order to achieve these aims, a qualitative research design is employed, with understanding theory as a theoretical framework and various methods as tools. Thematic analysis is used to analyze the data with software-ATLAS.ti-aided. This cross-cultural comparative exploratory study's results show that a proper understanding of inclusive education should fully consider the local flavour in both Italian and Chinese cultural, historical and political contexts. Considering that, this exploratory study, to some extent, is not "comparative" because there is no attempt to treat the data from two quite different contexts as comparable, but I wish that various questions and issues which emerge from considering two quite different contexts, Italy and China, will be illuminating and enrich our understanding of how to make education more inclusive. Given the results of this exploratory study, there is not a single understanding of inclusive education. On the contrary, inclusive education has many faces, for that point, Chinese philosophy of "he er bu tong" (harmony but not sameness) provides us some implications.