DoProfiL

The Dortmund Profile for Inclusion-Oriented Teacher Education

With the project "DoProfiL - Dortmund Profile for Inclusion-Oriented Teacher Education", which is funded by the“Qualitätsoffensive Lehrer_innenbildung”, the TU Dortmund responds to the demands resulting from the increasing social relevance of heterogeneity and inclusion. The project aims to improve the content, didactics and structure of higher education teacher training and thus optimize it. In addition to the scientific and didactic research, which aims at the development and implementation of new teaching and learning formats as well as their curricular integration, the interdisciplinary university process in the context of the Change Management and the didactic qualification of higher education teachers, is a pivotal component of the project. However, this has hardly been considered in the discussion about inclusion-oriented teacher education so far (Dannenbeck/Dorrance 2016; Drolshagen 2015).

With this understanding of an inclusive qualification of teachers and organizational development, DoBuS focuses within the project DoProfiL on the matter of facilitating and realizing inclusively taught inclusion. Measures are developed and applied that allow teachers not only to teach inclusion, but also to implement the content taught in the shaping of their individual teachings. In this way, the own teaching as well as the university as an institution is self-critically examined regarding exclusion risks and inclusive potentials.

With the objective to open a discursive space in higher education and to develop a common understanding of inclusion, DoBuS, together with the Chair of Higher Education Didactics and Research, already conducted and evaluated in the first funding phase four World Cafés.  A wide variety of qualification measures in higher education didactics increased the awareness of the teachers in DoProfiL for impairments and their significance in the context of higher education learning processes. With respect to potentially or existing exclusionary structures, cultures and practices, learning settings and teaching methods were reflected upon.

Among others, DoBuS has designed and provides the following courses in higher education didactics:

•  Workshop Studying with Disability/Chronic Illness at TU Dortmund University
•  Workshop and refresher workshop on accessible presentations 
•  Workshop on granting compensation for disadvantages in exams
•  Coaching "Teaching Inclusion inclusive, but How?

In the second funding phase, this higher education didactic program will be revised and extended and will continue to be offered to all teachers of DoProfiL. In its research, DoBuS addresses the question of the degree to which one's own impairment and disability experiences can also be understood in terms of a dual expertise in an inclusion-oriented teacher education program. In other words, DoBus deals with the extent to which the conscious and deliberate recourse to one's own experience of impairment and disability can also constitute a competence. 

Within the framework of the project, the IDEAward is annually awarded to programs or teaching approaches that especially address the issue of inclusion. DoBuS is a member of that Jury.