Abstract:

Slovakia is currently facing increasing pressure to implement changes into the school legislation that will comply with European trends in the education policy and will create conditions for inclusive education. By the ratification of international documents and gaining membership in the European Agency for the Development of Special Needs Education in 2012, Slovakia has embraced the ideas of inclusive education, but is still lacking an explicitly declared political requirement for inclusive education in Slovakia. Ideas for inclusive education are received with puzzlement, not only by the parents, but also by the teaching and professional public. There is no general consensus on the importance, necessity or feasibility of inclusive education, as well as no clear vision on how to grasp the idea of inclusive education so that any systemic and structural changes would reflect the country's historical and cultural specificities. The authors of the study provide a comparative analysis of the historical development of the Slovak and English education system and outline the possibilities and perspectives of inclusive education in Slovakia. England was chosen for a reason. This country is an interesting reference country for Slovakia, as its education system has evolved on a completely different trajectory, and due to this England has its own tradition of inclusive education and is generally accepted as the path to be taken. Comparative analysis is also the basis for examining the opinions, attitudes or views of Slovak and English teachers on inclusive education. In the conclusion of the study, the authors outlined the possibilities of studying and comparing the concept of inclusive school in two different cultural contexts. Based on the theory of social representations by the French psychologist S. Moscoviciho (1961, 1984) they formulate the assumption that, given the different historical and cultural characteristics of the countries surveyed, the English and Slovak respondents will assign the inclusive school with different attributes. When mapping the respondents’ perception, the authors recommend to use the Q methodology, which in its complexity allows to explore the semantic world of teachers and to show in how many ways the concept of inclusive school can be interpreted on the background of different social discourse.

Keywords:

Inclusive education, comparative analysis, theory of social representations, Q methodology.