“They Really Need to Handle, Inspect, and Experience Things”

On Teachers’ Practices and Strategies to Teach Technology Inclusively at Primary Level

Abstract

Taking pupils’ diverse needs into account is considered a central requirement of inclusive education (Booth & Ainscow, 2016). These needs are—according to Ainscow’s (2007) inclusive turn—not primarily ‘special educational needs’, but diverse needs of all learners. For the rather segregated German educational system, this endeavour applies especially to primary education, where needs are still developing and pupils are not yet assigned to different types of schooling according to their needs and abilities.

Despite a substantial amount of research on pupils’ basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence and social relatedness (Ryan et al., 2022), strategies that technology education teachers apply in this regard are not yet well understood. Besides interventional studies on technology education, indicating effectiveness of self‑directed and action‑oriented teaching and learning, there is a dearth of research on how teachers address different needs as a routine.

The purpose of the presented study is therefore to investigate and systematize actions and strategies teachers apply, and to specify how pupils' needs are considered when teaching technology education on a given topic.

The overall study used a mixed-methods approach to the question how pupils’ needs are characterized by themselves and by their teachers, and how they were taken into account in a lesson adapted and delivered by the teachers. In the sub-study presented here, participating primary school teachers were interviewed about their consideration of pupils’ needs whilst planning and conducting a technology education unit on the functionality of robots.

The results gained from qualitative content analysis of the interviews indicate that although the anticipation of different needs is considered challenging, teachers possess a substantiate amount of practices and strategies to take them into account.

The paper systematizes the practices teachers described in structured interviews within strategies and discusses the contribution of taking basic needs into account for inclusive technology education.