Conference Program

International and national educational policies recognize teacher education as a strategic lever for promoting inclusive schooling. Nevertheless, a substantial body of research highlights a persistent gap between the normative discourse on inclusion and everyday educational practices. This gap can be attributed, at least in part, to the endurance of social representations of disability grounded in deficit-oriented and ableist paradigms, which continue to implicitly shape teachers’ attitudes, educational expectations, and instructional choices. This contribution offers a theoretical and methodological reflection on teacher education as a privileged space for the deconstruction of perceptions and attitudes toward disability, positioning professional reflexivity as a central formative device. Drawing on the theoretical framework of social representations and the concept of professional habitus, the paper examines how tacit cognitive schemes, doxic beliefs, and embodied dispositions orient educational action – often below the threshold of conscious awareness – thereby reproducing practices that contradict the principles of inclusive education. From this perspective, teacher education cannot be reduced to the transmission of technical or methodological competencies, but must be understood as a transformative process aimed at critically interrogating the dominant educational imaginary surrounding disability. Particular attention is devoted to reflexivity as a practice capable of making visible the cultural assumptions underpinning teaching practices and of activating processes of critical reworking of professional experience. The contribution discusses a range of reflective training devices – including the narration of practices, professional and autobiographical writing, the analysis of instructional planning, professional journaling, and dialogic peer exchange – conceived as tools for bringing to the surface stereotypes, automatisms, and implicit attitudes toward disability. These devices enable teachers to critically examine the distance between inclusive discourses and enacted practices, fostering a transformation of professional habitus toward greater awareness, critical engagement, and inclusivity. The aim of the paper is to offer theoretical and methodological insights for rethinking teacher education as an ethical and political practice, capable of supporting the development of a reflective teaching professionalism oriented toward educational justice and the construction of genuinely inclusive educational practices.