Continuing Teacher Education and School Inclusion: Adapted Pedagogical Practices, Curricular Accessibility, And Teacher Professional Development
This article discusses the continuing education of teachers as a structuring condition for the realization of school inclusion, understood not as the mere enrollment of students who are the target population of special education in regular classes, but as the guarantee of participation, learning, and permanence within diversity. The aim is to analyze how adapted pedagogical practices, curricular accessibility, and teacher professional development articulate in the construction of inclusive schools, while also revealing the institutional limits that separate normative discourse from the concrete conditions of teaching work. This is a theoretical essay of a bibliographical and documentary nature, articulating scholarship on inclusive education and teacher education, the recent Brazilian normative framework, including Decree No. 12,686 of 2025, amended by Decree No. 12,773 of 2025, and Ministry of Education Ordinance No. 421 of 2026, and data from the Basic Education School Census together with secondary analyses based on those data. The discussion shows that adapting teaching is not equivalent to simplifying content and that continuing education, when conceived as a permanent, situated, and collective process, offers teachers conceptual and practical resources to differentiate mediation without reducing the student to a disability. It is concluded that school inclusion depends on a systemic commitment capable of articulating training, planning, resources, accessibility, collaborative work, and democratic management, lest the responsibility for a challenge that is also political and structural be transferred to the teacher in isolation.