Multigrade teaching and learning: Developing theoretical frameworks through mapping conceptual territories with an inclusive education lens

This paper offers an engagement, through an inclusive education lens, with the theoretical frameworks and concepts used in multigrade teaching and learning. With the aim of developing and extending thinking about pedagogies in diverse education settings, it employs a scoping literature review to identify and examine the various conceptual frameworks which underpin thinking about and practice within multigrade classrooms. It is argued that close study of the knowledges used by teachers in multigrade classrooms, which are implicitly diverse education spaces, offers a useful way with which to consider pedagogies in all diverse education settings. Study of multigrade classrooms also offers space to develop understanding of the tensions for inclusive education generated through ‘mainstream’ organisation of schooling as single age classes. Emerging in the body of literature resulting from the scoping study are five ‘knowledge territories’ which appear to be contributing to the work of educators in multigrade settings: Child centred approaches, constructivist thinking; inclusion; cooperative and collective education; Education for All. Through the process of working together with the five strands, looking at where they overlap and interact, we suggest that it is possible to assemble a ‘core pedagogik’ for multigrade classrooms. The article concludes with arguments for the potential of and capacity for multigrade settings to be productive spaces for development of pedagogical practices and theoretical understandings of all diverse classrooms.