Disability in the Syllabus: exploring teachers’ willingness, educational strategies and teaching mediators

Tackling at school a sensitive subject like disability requires both teachers’ willingness and awareness about the importance of dealing with this subject in the classroom and the educational and didactic concerns. The Italian school, characterized by a long tradition of welcoming children with disabilities, needs the structuring, into the curriculum, of specific proactive interventions, which, using didactic mediators, provide children with a deeper understanding of disability. The design of such educational interventions requires a great commitment to teachers because it recalls several factors (categories) including those related to the identification of appropriate teaching strategies, the choice of possible mediators but above all to questioning the availability, intentionality, opportunity of teachers to propose children a theme considered 'sensitive'. With the aim of knowing what are the considerations of the teachers on this topic, it was designed a sequential exploratory research, composed by a qualitative and quantitative phases.