Inclusive pedagogies in multilingual classrooms: teachers’ perspectives on supporting students with learning disabilities

Abstract

Inclusive education in linguistically plural societies is often negotiated in a contested space between policy rhetoric and classroom reality. This qualitative study shows how language-subject teachers in Kerala (India) conceptualise and enact the inclusion of learners with difficulties in a tri-lingual milieu comprising Malayalam, English, and Hindi. With an interpretivist design and abductive logic, we conducted interviews with 20 teachers and analyzed their responses using Reflexive Thematic Analysis. Five themes emerged: (1) teachers’ understanding of inclusive education, (2) challenges in implementing inclusive education, (3) challenges in multilingual inclusive classrooms, (4) institutional and policy support, and (5) teachers’ reflections on and future directions. The findings show that teachers routinely mobilise translanguaging and Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles to remove barriers to presence, participation, and achievement. However, these gains are rendered ‘invisible’ when examinations reward monolingual written outputs. This study advances the theory by integrating the inclusive education framework with translanguaging, biliteracy continua, UDL, and orthographic-depth accounts to explain the persistent oral–written gap. It advocates for the redesign of assessments, state-endorsed oral fluency scales, script-sensitive rubrics, portfolio-based evidence, protected remedial time, and proximal professional development. These shifts would convert teacher-observed progress into recognised achievement and stabilise inclusion beyond individual goodwill.