Teacher trainees’ Awareness: A key factor for inclusion of Children with learning disabilities

Inclusive education is a flexible educational system provides opportunities for Special need Children to educate in a regular classroom with their normal peers. Teachers play a vital role in moulding their students. Regular classroom teachers’ awareness about various types of disabilities and their educational need is a significant factor which determines the success of inclusion. The present study tries to find out the awareness of teacher trainees’ awareness about learning disability. It is imperative because they are future teachers and they have to handle such children in their classrooms. A descriptive survey method was used. A closed ended questionnaire consisting 30 items was used for data collection. 33 B. Ed. trainees studying in different B. Ed. training collages in Kerala was the participants of the study. From the study it was found out that majority of the teacher trainees have an average level of awareness about learning disability. This is the need of the hour to find out how much the teacher trainees are aware about learning disabilities. It is imperative since the teacher trainees are the future teachers and they have to handle children with learning disabilities in their classrooms. So it is very essential to take action to improve the awareness of teachers, teacher educators and teacher trainees about learning disability. Otherwise such children are ignored in our mainstream classrooms.