The impact of a faculty training program on inclusive education and disability

•Training on disability and inclusive education can have a positive impact on teaching practices.•Design, develop and evaluate training programs on disability is necessary at the University to improve the attention that faculty members provide to students with disabilities.•A faculty well-informed is the first step to tearing down some of the barriers found by students with disabilities.•Faculty members had learned how to design and develop syllabuses based on the principles of Universal Design for Learning.•Faculty members feel more motivated and more sensitive towards the needs of students with disabilities. This paper describes the knowledge gained by 20 faculty members following their participation in a training program on inclusive education and disability. The study, which was conducted at an university in Spain, aimed to design, implement and evaluate a program for training faculty members to respond in an inclusive manner to the needs of students with disabilities. An initial, formative and summative qualitative evaluation was carried out and four instruments were used for collecting the data: group and individual interviews, written open-ended questionnaires and observations. The data were analyzed inductively, using a category and code system. The results reveal that, after the training program, faculty considered what they had learned to be useful for their professional practice and highlighted that they felt better-informed and better-trained in relation to disability and were more aware of the needs of students with disabilities. Finally, in the conclusions section, the paper discusses the results in relation to those reported by other studies, and offers some recommendations for universities planning to implement training policies designed to build more inclusive learning environments.