INCLUSIVE EDUCATION FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT: EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION THROUGH THE INDEX FOR INCLUSION MODEL

The contribution intends to discuss the topic of the relationship between inclusive education and environmental sustainability, in the light of the cultural proposal coming from the updated edition of the Index for inclusion [1]. The Index is an essential document for the promotion of inclusive culture at a global level, according to the authors of the 2014 edition. Downstream of a broad and articulated experimentation path of the previous edition, and in the wave of the cultural change recognized by the disability studies literature [2], the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities [3], as well as the health functioning model recognized by the ICF [4], replace the special curricula in the inclusive school, resulting in a part of curricula that places environmental education and sustainability at the heart of the discussion, including the latter among the founding values of the inclusive process. The index contains an explicit and detailed framework of values for educational action as an invitation to develop, within the different contexts, actions to make these values concrete; furthermore, it brings together principled approaches to education development and encourages a broad alliance for inclusive change with a particular emphasis on sustainability and the role of education in understanding, recognizing, and combating environmental deterioration. To concretely implement sustainable development policies, it is essential to use tools that allow guiding the behavior of organizations, companies, and society [5]. Training contexts have cultural and political governance that should guide teaching choices and practices with a view to constant monitoring and improvement. The contribution, starting from this intuition of the authors, argues in which terms sustainability and ecological awareness constitute some of the most important and urgent tools for building inclusion, and presents the action research path started with the network of Salento schools, aimed at promoting this path in interdisciplinary perspective between ecological education and inclusive education to identify actions, processes and contents that must be promoted in school contexts to guide the training of citizens and the development of inclusive behaviors. The contribution presents the tools for detecting the level of sustainability implemented in the school contexts investigated. The questionnaires are the result of the selection of Index Indicators for the analysis of actions to promote sustainability. The contribution will discuss, in support of this perspective, the data that emerged from the field survey conducted at the schools of the Province of Lecce in the academic years 2020-2021 and 2021-2022, involved in a research-action project aimed at sustainable education and inclusive. The analysis of the results of the surveys [6], has made it possible to highlight a series of critical issues of the real ecological awareness of teachers and of the various components of the school communities, which prevent a complete taking charge of ecological and environmental issues