Despite policy calling for enhanced inclusive practice within all schools and colleges, educators across Europe are facing increasing challenges when providing effective inclusive education for all students as a result of increased diversity within European society. This paper focuses on the development of our understanding of how to support educators’ professional learning around issues of diversity and inclusion. Specifically, it aims to explore what diversity looks like across countries, sectors, and roles, what challenges and dilemmas are posed for educators, and how new approaches to professional learning can support the educators across all sectors. The exploratory study described in the paper emerged from work undertaken as part of an Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership project called PROMISE (Promoting Inclusion in Society through Inclusion: Professional Dilemmas in Practice). Traditional approaches to professional learning to support teachers’ inclusive practice have tended to focus on discrete courses which address specific learning needs such as autism, literacy difficulties, or behavioural issues. The paper presents findings from a transnational study which indicate that the professional dilemmas facing educators are complex and unpredictable and argues, therefore, that educators require professional learning that is collaborative, interprofessional, and acknowledges that the challenges they face are multifaceted.

In this paper, we approach modelling mathematics dispositions from a different methodological perspective in order to shed more light into the complex interplay between teaching practices and students’ learning outcomes. We draw on survey data from around 5000 students from Year 7–11 (age 11–16) from 40 Secondary schools in England. Our methodological approach includes Rasch modelling to produce measures of attitudinal outcomes as well as students’ perceptions of pedagogic practices. We then employ fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fs/QCA) to explore the relationships between students’ characteristics and the perceived type of teaching they receive in mathematics. We use two measures of ‘transmissionist teaching’ which aim to quantify the degree to which teaching practices are perceived as ‘teacher-centred’. One measure gives the students’ perceptions and the other gives the teacher’s perspective. We find that different configurations of student and teacher perceptions of transmissionist teaching are associated with high and low mathematical dispositions for different year groups and for boys and girls. We discuss the methodological merits of this approach along with the substantive educational implications of these findings.

Objectives This paper reports on the development of a culturally adapted, school-based mindfulness intervention (SBMI) for delivery in schools in Rwanda and Ethiopia as part of an interdisciplinary applied health research project on child and adolescent mental wellbeing. Against a backdrop of rising global concern about child and adolescent mental health and limited evidence-based interventions in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), this study investigates the processes through which a universal mindfulness curriculum was co-constructed with teacher educators, mindfulness experts, and community representative. Methods In this qualitative research, semi-structured interviews were conducted with the teacher educators, community representative and mindfulness experts involved in the project. The interview transcripts were analysed in NVivo using Clarke and Braun’s updated six-phase thematic analysis approach. Final themes were teacher learning, adaptations, negotiation as knotworking, tensions and trade-offs. Results The findings show that curriculum development involved sustained teacher learning, extensive cultural and contextual adaptation, and dynamic forms of collaborative problem-solving conceptualised as knotworking. These processes responded to constraints such as large class sizes, limited resources, linguistic diversity, and religious sensitivities. The resulting curriculum emphasises short, contextually grounded practices integrated across the school day. Conclusions The development of this school-based mindfulness curriculum for Rwanda and Ethiopia illustrates the complexity of designing mental wellbeing interventions that are culturally resonant, contextually feasible, and educationally meaningful within low resource settings. The study contributes new evidence on curriculum co-design for wellbeing in low-resource contexts and provides insights into how universal SBMIs can be meaningfully adapted for Low- and Middle-Income Country (LMIC) educational systems.

This paper reckons with the educator’s role in modern education systems by using the ideas of complicity and resistance to explore the challenge of working equitably within inequitable systems. I argue that viewing complicity and resistance on a spectrum and actions in their wider social and political context helps us to understand, as educators, not only our own complicity with the oppression that modern educational systems generate but also the degree to which we are constrained in our own actions. Further, I suggest that educators work within constraints that make an individualistic view of subjectification as an educational purpose impossible and that pursuit of this may not, in turn, serve students well when they encounter constraints to freedom outside the classroom. Given this, I suggest that it is still possible to practice a form of pastoral pedagogy that prioritises engagement with the individual and uses a non-coercive approach to support autonomy for students but that this form of pedagogy additionally allows for consideration of the constraints the teacher and the student may be subject to. I use the film Woman in the Dunes (Suna No Onna, 1964) as a thinking tool for this discussion and suggest that engaging with the film allows for a form of thinking aloud on the topic of complicity, resistance and pastoral pedagogy by presenting a ‘meaningful world’ that is not reducible to simple classification nor is purely illustrative (Gibbs, 2017a; Gibbs, 2017b, p278). Encountering, via film, a completely new world and considering the parallels with more familiar educational contexts, allows for a consideration of wider ethical questions about education and the role of educators (Laugier, 2021).