Knowledge sharing between special education and regular education teachers: a case study

Abstract

School environments are readily perceivable as a rich and necessary space for collaborative work, where the sharing of information and knowledge generates significant results for the students' learning, and especially so for students with Special Educational Needs. In this sense, the aim of the present article was to understand how knowledge sharing takes place between the conducting teacher and the Special Education teacher in the context of school inclusion observable in the school that was studied, in order to assess whether or not this practice really operates in a significant way between the teachers. From a methodology standpoint, this was a descriptive research of an applied nature with a qualitative approach through means of a single case study. Initially, we explored the literature on Knowledge Management and the legislative documents that orient Special Education in the State of Paraná. Then, a semi-structured interview was conducted with the teachers of a certain school. For the data analysis, we employed the content analysis from the perspective of Bardin (2011). Our main conclusion was that although the teachers who are involved with the students from the multifunctional resource classroom reported and noticed the need for their own collective interaction and planning, the sharing of information and knowledge between them does not occur, since their activities are mostly carried out in isolation. Therefore, no collaborative work between them is able to arise due to a series of different inhibiting factors which make it difficult to put this type of work into practice, that is, the kind of work proposed from the perspective of inclusive education.