Abstract:

In the era of 21st century, inclusive education has become a necessity in promoting a modern school for all students, including those with those with mild disabilities who are now widely included in general classrooms (UNESCO, 1994). Consequently, students with mild disabilities have become to be vastly included in general classrooms, running the risk of marginalization due to their difficulties in reaching schools' normative views of ability (Hickey, 2020) and opposing significant and multifaceted challenges on educators (Beaton, Thomson, Cornelius, Lofthouse, Kools, & Huber, 2021). Furthermore, STEAM education, as an evolution of STEM with the addition of Arts, has started to become a core teaching technique due to the new skills required for the future citizens from national and international economies and workplaces (Singh, 2021), posing, also, significant challenges on educators (Herro, Quigley, & Cian, 2017; Spyropoulou & Kameas, 2020). Despite these challenges, there is little research on the combination of these two modern educational approaches and their impact on educators.
In order to address the such gap, in the context of the Erasmus+ project SPICE: Special Education STEAM Academy, we developed an Inclusive STEAM Educators' Competence Framework based on STEAM Educators' Competence Framework (Spyropoulou & Kameas, 2021) and using the Delphi technique procedure proposed by Fong, Ch'ng & Por (2013), with little adaptations to add any competences related to inclusion. The framework serves as a valuable tool for educators for self-evaluation and self-regulation purposes and allowing the support and professional development of Inclusive STEAM educators. It is innovative in that it is the first STEAM Educators' Competence Framework for Inclusive education.
This paper provides an insight into the roles, areas and the competences an educator should have to address all learners' needs in Inclusive STEAM Environments, providing a description of the next steps in order to validate the current framework would be achieved.

References:
[1] Beaton, M., Thomson, S., Cornelius, S., Lofthouse, R., Kools, Q., & Huber, S. (2021). Conceptualising Teacher Education for Inclusion: Lessons for the Professional Learning of Educators from Transnational and Cross-Sector Perspectives. Sustainability , 13 (4).
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[8] UNESCO. (1994). The Salamanca Statement and framework for action on Special Needs Education. Salamanca, Spain: UNESCO.

Keywords:

Educators, STEAM education, Inclusion, Inclusive STEAM, SEN students, competences, professional development.