Conference Agenda

Inclusive education and the meaningful use of assistive technologies (AT) for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are key priorities within European education systems. AT—such as augmentative and alternative communication tools, visual supports, and digital applications—can enhance communication, predictability, and social-emotional development, particularly in early childhood education. Despite evidence of their effectiveness, AT remains inconsistently implemented in inclusive classrooms. This inconsistency is closely linked to digital inequalities, limited teacher preparedness, uneven institutional support, and insufficient integration of inclusive digital pedagogies into teacher education. These issues have strong European relevance because they affect equity, accessibility, and participation across diverse education systems.

Teachers are central to translating inclusive policies into classroom practice. Their professional knowledge, attitudes, and confidence determine whether AT is used as a meaningful pedagogical resource or remains underutilized. Although European policy frameworks promote equity and inclusive participation, teachers across countries continue to face challenges related to training, infrastructure, and guidance on developmentally appropriate and evidence-based AT use. This study responds to the need for cross-national research that examines teacher preparedness and professional support needs in relation to inclusive education and AT, with a particular focus on the social-emotional development of children with ASD.

The overarching objective of the study is to explore how pre-service and in-service teachers from Poland, Spain, and Türkiye perceive their preparedness, challenges, and support needs when working with children with ASD in inclusive educational settings. Particular attention is given to the role of assistive technologies in supporting social-emotional learning and inclusion.

Research aims include:

• Examining teachers’ perceived preparedness and challenges in inclusive classrooms across different national contexts.
• Analysing how initial teacher education and professional development contribute to readiness for inclusive practices and AT integration.
• Identifying patterns of AT use and key barriers to effective implementation.
• Exploring the types of resources and supports teachers consider most critical for fostering social-emotional development in children with ASD.

Research questions:

1. How do pre-service and in-service teachers perceive their preparedness to support children with ASD in inclusive settings?
2. What challenges do teachers encounter in integrating AT to support social-emotional development?
3. How do national contexts shape teachers’ experiences and access to professional support?

The study is grounded in inclusive pedagogy and socio-cultural perspectives, which conceptualise inclusion as a dynamic process shaped by interactions between learners, teachers, institutional structures, and policy environments. Inclusive pedagogy emphasises responsibility for all learners and flexible, non-deficit-based teaching approaches. Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles further inform the study by framing AT as a means of reducing barriers through multiple forms of representation, engagement, and expression.

Additionally, the study draws on the CASEL framework for social and emotional learning, which identifies five core competencies—self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making. AT is conceptualised as a mediating tool that can scaffold thesecompetencies when embedded within developmentally appropriate and inclusive pedagogical practices.

This study adopts a cross-national comparative design involving pre-service and in-service teachers from Poland, Spain, and Türkiye, reflecting the European dimension of the Erasmus+ project EARLY-ASD (project no. 2024-1-PL01-KA220-HED-000246304). The research aims to capture both shared and context-specific patterns in teacher preparedness, professional support needs, and the integration of AT for children with ASD in inclusive classrooms.

A mixed-methods approach is employed to provide both breadth and depth in understanding teachers’ experiences. Quantitative data are collected through a structured online survey designed to measure teachers’ self-perceived preparedness, attitudes toward inclusion, use of AT, and access to professional support. The survey includes standardized items and scales adapted from established instruments in inclusive education and educational technology research, ensuring comparability across national contexts.

Across European education systems, inclusion is increasingly framed in terms of access, participation, and recognition of diversity. Policy frameworks and institutional practices emphasise widening access and supporting engagement, particularly in higher education and professional pathways. Yet many autistic adults—especially those who have formally entered and remained within these systems—describe persistent exhaustion, withdrawal, and burnout that arise not from exclusion, but from the sustained effort of remaining included. This recurring pattern raises a central question: under what conditions does participation become sustainable, and what does it require to remain recognisable as such within contemporary inclusion regimes?

This paper develops the concept of inclusive exhaustion to analyse exhaustion as a relational and institutional phenomenon rather than an individual coping failure. It builds on qualitative research on autistic burnout, masking, and participation (Raymaker et al., 2020; Botha & Frost, 2020; Hull et al., 2017), which consistently describes cycles of high effort, delayed collapse, and withdrawal. While this research is often interpreted in terms of stress or vulnerability, the present analysis instead examines the conditions under which participation becomes possible, and how these conditions are distributed.

The argument proceeds through a distinction between epistemic and performative dimensions of participation. Epistemic difficulty concerns the work of understanding and learning. Performative difficulty concerns the conditions under which this understanding must become visible as competence—through timing, responsiveness, and adherence to implicit norms. This distinction helps explain why exhaustion persists even where epistemic access is supported: while learning may be accessible, the conditions under which learning must be displayed remain continuous and evaluatively charged.

Within this framework, participation depends not only on knowledge or competence, but on the capacity to render that competence intelligible under prevailing expectations. This often involves what can be described as translation labour: the ongoing work of interpreting expectations, calibrating responses, and aligning expression with dominant norms of communication. Participants describe not only having to understand tasks, but having to determine how much to say, how quickly to respond, and how to appear appropriately engaged.

These dynamics are situated within a critical–phenomenological account of institutional time and organisation. Drawing on work on rhythm and resonance (Fuchs, 2018; Rosa, 2019) and on audit and performativity in education (Ball, 2003; Power, 1997), the paper argues that educational environments are organised around expectations of continuous performance, visibility, and responsiveness. Where institutional systems lack slack or flexibility, the burden of adjustment shifts onto individuals, who must sustain alignment across contexts in order to remain recognisable as competent.

From this perspective, inclusive exhaustion can be understood as the cumulative cost of sustaining participation under conditions of misalignment between uneven cognitive rhythms and environments calibrated for continuous performance. Exhaustion emerges not simply from high demand, but from the requirement to remain intelligible within systems that do not make their expectations explicit. What appears as individual fatigue can thus be reinterpreted as an index of institutional miscalibration.

The paper contributes to inclusive education research by shifting the focus from access to the sustainability of participation over time. In relation to the conference theme Knowing and Acting, it highlights how inclusion regimes privilege particular forms of acting—being visibly engaged and responsive—while marginalising forms of knowing that unfold unevenly or require temporal margin. While developed through autistic experience, inclusive exhaustion is proposed as a travelling concept for understanding participation under audit-driven inclusion regimes more broadly.

Across superdiverse education systems, NEET (Not in Employment, Education, or Training) trajectories are often explained through visible socio-economic constraints—poverty, migration, family structure—while "quiet barriers" inside schooling remain under-measured. This paper argues that reading comprehension functions as an invisible gatekeeper to participation in secondary education, vocational pathways, and labor-market entry, particularly for neurodivergent learners (including autism spectrum disorder, dyslexia, and other learning differences) who are frequently underserved in inclusive education implementation.

We develop an inclusion-to-transition pathway model in which literacy access is not only a pedagogical issue but also a mechanism shaping opportunity structures. In superdiverse contexts, literacy barriers interact with disability status, language background, gendered expectations, and institutional capacity, producing non-linear risk accumulation. The result is that students can be formally "included" (i.e., enrolled in mainstream classrooms) yet practically excluded from curricular access, credential attainment, and transition supports—conditions that elevate NEET risk.

Reading comprehension is foundational to nearly all secondary-level learning: understanding textbooks, following instructions, accessing digital resources, and participating in assessments. For neurodivergent students, difficulties with decoding, vocabulary, inference-making, or executive function can create cascading disadvantages. When these difficulties are not identified early or addressed with evidence-based interventions, students fall progressively behind, experience repeated academic failure, and disengage from schooling. This disengagement is often misattributed to "lack of motivation" or "family problems" rather than recognized as a consequence of inadequate literacy support.

The problem is compounded in superdiverse settings where teachers face high classroom heterogeneity (students with varying language proficiencies, prior schooling experiences, and support needs) but receive limited training in differentiated instruction or evidence-based literacy interventions. Research from Turkey, Jordan, and similar middle-income contexts shows that inclusive education policies are often implemented without corresponding investments in teacher capacity, instructional materials, or progress monitoring systems (Kuyini & Desai, 2007; Savolainen et al., 2012). As a result, neurodivergent students—who could succeed with appropriate supports—are left to "sink or swim," and many sink.

This paper synthesizes evidence across three domains: (i) reading comprehension interventions suitable for inclusive classrooms (e.g., explicit instruction, graphic organizers, peer-assisted learning), (ii) progress monitoring and individualized supports (e.g., curriculum-based measurement, single-case design), and (iii) transition-focused instruction linking academic access to employability skills (e.g., functional literacy, self-advocacy, career exploration). We argue that addressing literacy barriers is not merely a matter of academic equity but a structural transformation lever: improving reading comprehension for neurodivergent students increases human capital, reduces dropout and NEET risk, and enhances labor-market participation.

Our conceptual contribution is twofold. First, we reframe literacy access as a system-level mechanism rather than an individual deficit. Poor reading outcomes reflect not only student characteristics but also teacher capacity, curriculum design, assessment practices, and institutional responsiveness. Second, we propose a feasible evaluation design for subsequent empirical work: using single-case experimental design (a strength of special education research) to trace mechanisms at the individual level, while integrating system-level indicators (e.g., school policies, transition provisions, NEET rates) to ensure relevance beyond individual cases. This design is particularly suited to middle-income and low-income contexts where large-scale randomized trials are often infeasible.

We conclude with implications for teacher education, inclusive curriculum design, and policy: if reading comprehension remains unaddressed as a foundational access mechanism, inclusion agendas risk becoming symbolic rather than transformative. By making literacy barriers visible and actionable, we can strengthen the link between inclusive education and economic participation.

Background

Higher education is in Norway a key gateway to employment and provides opportunities for participation in society and independent living. Therefore, it has been a stated political goal for decades to get more students with disabilities to complete higher education (Bø, 2018). The legislation provides the basis for students with disabilities to have individual right to accommodation (Equality and Anti-Discrimination Act, 2017; Universities and Colleges Act, 2024).

Students who have both a disability and a high learning potential are a topic which in lesser degree have been investigated through research. Being “doubly exceptional” can be challenging both for the student themselves, and for those around them. It may be assumed that students with high learning potential can manage on their own. High learning potential can manifest itself in acquiring learning content at a faster pace than others, and having great potential within academic subjects such as mathematics, reading/writing/language, arts, science, and technology (Idsøe, 2025, p. 649). A great learning potential can occur simultaneously with learning disorders such as ASD, which may point to a need for accommodation even with good cognitive abilities (Idsøe, 2025, p. 651-652).

Purpose

The purpose of this ongoing study is to investigate how HE students with both high learning potential and a disability in the form of ASD (autism spectrum disorder), can manage academic learning activities, and further, to what extent they are provided with help and support in the form of accommodations. ASD was selected as disability because several studies indicate that students with this diagnosis are a growing student group (Gelbar et al., 2014, p. 2593; Knarlag, 2016). The article examines the part of student life that deals with participation in and completion of academic learning activities such as lectures, work requirements and reading the syllabus and other academic material on their own. The research question following this study is: How do students with both high learning potential and ASD experience the completion of academic learning activities, and what offers of accommodation are they becoming in HE?

Several studies indicate that academic learning activities have been less investigated through research, and this also applies to students with disabilities. As an example, Anderson et al., (2019, p. 1554) point out that “the significance of their [ASD students] academic difficulties and need for academic support may have been undervalued”. Failure to succeed in academic tasks can lead to students with ASD dropping out of higher education (Byrne, 2022).

Challenges

For children and young people with great learning potential, teaching and tasks can be experienced as unrewarding and unmotivating both in primary and secondary education, and they can thus appear as underachievers (Lie, 2014, p. 87). It is therefore not obvious that students with great learning potential will get as far as higher education in their qualification for adult life. It is also not obvious that academic learning activities in HE will “go by themselves”.

Academic learning activities require concentration, staying focused and being able to work purposefully with abstract texts and content over time. For students with ASD, this can be demanding, since a characteristic of the diagnosis is a failure of executive functions, which can be expressed in difficulties in planning, getting started with academic tasks, regulating time and energy, and making choices (Gleinsvik et al., 2018, p. 22; Knarlag, 2016, p. 19). Against this background, it is relevant to investigate the extent to which “doubly exceptional” can also lead to "double challenges" in completion of academic learning activities.