Essentialising teachers' education for inclusive education: The forms, characteristics, and synergies that support capacity building for sustainable inclusive practice

Abstract How teachers are trained and professionally developed for inclusive education is an important focus of policy, research, and practice. Such preparation arguably affects their knowledge, skills, beliefs, attitudes, and motivation to improve student learning outcomes and transform practice. However, the context and approach to teachers' education for inclusion vary across countries and educational institutions and searching for its effective features remains an unending goal. To capture holistic perspectives on preparing teachers for inclusive education from a non‐Western, developing context, we used a multi‐site case study approach and conducted interviews with headteachers and teachers of early childhood settings and schools. Findings indicate inclusive education‐based training and learning programmes with practical, authentic, and blended characterisations support development of teachers' core knowledge, skills, values, and dispositions. This article also reveals essential synergies among the education programmes that are all requisites enhancing teacher preparedness, currency, and professionalism. The study suggests pre‐service training programmes essentially leverage new learning, knowledge, and capacity acquisition. In concluding, this article calls for rethinking inclusive teacher preparation as continuing synergistic and to attend to contextual influences on it.