Latent epistemologies: Using AI, Machine Learning and Text Mining techniques to investigate pre-service teachers' personal epistemologies about inclusion

A workflow proposal

Abstract

Teachers’ specialization courses on support activities have represented in the last decade a privileged basin of investigation on inclusive processes. In Italy, numerous researches have focused on the beliefs, convictions, attitudes of pre-service teachers with respect to the concepts of inclusion, bio-psycho-social approach and inclusive practices, using practically the whole range of methodologies and instruments available to the scientific community involved in educational research. In the international scientific literature, teachers’ initial conceptualization of teaching, pedagogical decisions and practices and whatever happening in a classroom is viewed as a significant component of teaching practicum in teacher education programs. Historically, this particular field of research has been investigated using the constructs of Epistemic Cognition, Epistemological Belief and Personal Epistemology. Although these constructs also have significant differences between them, a common denominator seems to be the influence that the systems of beliefs, convictions and attitudes of teachers with respect to the idea of learning produce on the style of teaching, understood as manifestation of teachers’ hidden assumptions and beliefs about what to do and what not to do in a classroom, tasks to be covered, materials to be selected and teacher-student interaction. Precisely this implicit, hidden nature makes it difficult to investigate the phenomenon using traditional tools. The explicit statements of teachers do not always coincide with the implicit assumptions about the nature of learning and the inclusive process, that is the latter which, actually, guides teaching strategies. This work aims to adopt research tools (AI, Text Mining) consistent with the implicit nature of personal epistemologies, trying to circumvent the potential biases that mainly reside in the will of future teachers to adhere to the most accredited theoretical frameworks and in the difficulty of researchers to distinguish between explicit and implicit assumptions. In other words, we propose to experiment with research tools which are able to detect hidden topics and implicit assumptions in the statements of pre-service teachers relating to inclusive teaching processes and strategies and, more generally, to the concept of inclusion.