Prácticas pedagógicas, conocimientos y condiciones institucionales en las que laboran docentes colombianos. Un estudio sobre educación inclusiva y discapacidad

In 2017, Decree 1421 was issued in Colombia, according to which all schools in the country were to welcome students with disabilities and offer them quality opportunities for their entry, permanence, and graduation. The Ministry of Education (MEN, 2017) gave a deadline of five years, counted from its approval, for this policy to be implemented in the national territory. The objective of this research is to characterize the pedagogical practices, knowledge, and institutional conditions (pedagogical and administrative type) in which a sample of Colombian teachers work, six years after the de-cree was issued. For this purpose, a transectional non-experimental quantitative design was used, and a scale was applied to 249 teachers of early childhood education, elementary school, junior high school, and vocational middle school. Based on the findings, it can be concluded that there is a po-sitive change in the pedagogical practices and knowledge of those teachers who have training in inclusion and who work in private schools that receive students with these life trajectories. Even so, the institutional conditions of the teachers surveyed still do not respond to inclusive institutional pro-jects. Since, at the time of writing this paper, we did not find other similar studies in the country, these results are discussed in the light of internatio-nal research on the subject, and in the framework of national policy, and it enables extrapolating the challenges faced by the Colombian educational system in welcoming students with disabilities.