Inclusion and teacher education for special needs in Italy and Hungary

The present work stemmed from the collaboration between the University of Salerno (Italy) and the University of West Hungary and is part of a project aiming at implementing a unified educational training system whose core elements are initial teacher training, the organization of apprenticeship phases, and continuous professional development. Despite the clear and substantial differences between the school systems of the two countries, the aim that seems to unite the Italian and the Hungarian educational policies is the realization of truly inclusive school contexts within which teacher training takes on a leading role as teachers are the real guarantee that the process of inclusion in the educational and didactic field will be fully realized. With this aim, in both countries there is an ongoing debate about the need of a new teacher professionalism able to face the heterogeneity of today’s school contexts.