INCLUSIVE EDUCATION FOR PRE- SERVICE TEACHERS IN LATVIA - WHAT ARE THE LEARNING OUTCOMES FOR PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS?

To ensure the inclusive education in practice and to provide qualitative learning for all diverse learners the pre-service teacher education for inclusive education has become crucial. Pre-service teachers have to be prepared to deal with diversity challenges in everyday mainstream classroom. For that they need certain competencies - knowledge, attitude and skills to work in an inclusive environment. Recent publications in the field discuss both what should be the content and how to teach inclusive education to prepare pre-service teachers for inclusive education; should it be integrated into the curriculum, so called infused in the curriculum as a whole or should it be separated as a standalone course. This research assessed the pre-service teachers learning outcomes of the university course " Diversity in the School's Pedagogical Process ". The course is taught at the University of Latvia to pre-school teachers, primary school teachers, English, Latvian language teachers, sports teachers, IT teachers, and cultural education teachers. The course aims to prepare in-service teachers to work in diverse inclusive school environment. The research was conducted in 2018 spring semester, there were students from three different groups participated in the research - full time second year students, full time third year students and part time third year students. 206 self-assessment questionnaires were submitted all together. Each student completed the first self-assessment questionnaires at the beginning of the course and the second at the end of the course in order to assess (by using Likert Scale) his or her competencies in several dimensions - knowledge and comprehension of inclusive education, knowledge and comprehension of legal issues connected with inclusive education, identification of children's additional and special needs, principles of organization of teaching and learning process in the inclusive classroom, attitudes towards diversity and further education needs. The results point to positive self-evaluation of students in line with the learning outcomes achieved, but there are differences between study groups and dimensions.