Inclusive Education In Southern Africa

This book offers a framework for the implementation of inclusive education in developing countries. It proposes bringing the vulnerable to the centre of planning decisions, recognising the history of special education in psychologizing failure, and that mainstream must own the transformation to inclusive education.

Challenging Inclusive Education Policy and Practice in Africa explores notions of inclusion and inclusive education across a range of countries in Africa, from local and international perspectives.

This book reflects on more than two decades of adoption practices of inclusive education policy in Southern Africa. It is aimed at taking stock of the successes, challenges and achievements during this journey of making education inclusive and equitable. It responds to the educational needs of learners at all levels, regardless of their diverse needs, such as disability, gender, socio-economic status, race, ethnicity and language background. This book furthers the understanding and conceptualization of the notion of inclusion in education, and explores the challenges experienced during the operationalization and implementation of the process. It extends debates spawned by international and national policy mandates that sought to transcend exclusionary educational practices in order to realize inclusive societies and, by implication, inclusive classrooms. It offers a comprehensive conceptual framework for inclusive education in the Southern African context while drawing parallels from the regional and international experience. This book can be used as a reference or critical reading for scholars and researchers in the field of inclusive education. It will empower practitioners, administrators, teachers and school leaders, curriculum developers and planners, as well as policy makers with knowledge about theory and practice regarding inclusive education in the Southern African schooling system.

Exclusionary pressures and practices are pervasive in education, despite the clamour for more inclusive education. Even as classrooms worldwide become more diverse, education is unlikely to become inclusive without deliberate efforts to dismantle exclusion and enable inclusion. This book is a compilation of contributions to the conversation about what these efforts might entail. The conversation has its origins in the Making Education Inclusive Conference held in 2013, which brought together academics and practitioners from Southern Africa and other countries. Given the expectation that teachers should play a key role in promoting inclusion, it is not surprising to find significant interest in teacher education from many of the contributing authors. Their concerns range from explicit teacher development for pedagogical responsiveness to learner diversity, to overcoming the epistemological marginalisation that learners experience where teachers are not fully confident of their subject content and how to teach it. Access to education is clearly not enough, and other contributors to this book concern themselves with ways in which structures and systems could be reconstituted to enable meaningful inclusion. This might mean looking at how teachers might use tiered systems of behaviour support and various metacognitive strategies, how physical access can be promoted on a university campus, and understanding how parents think about disability. Each chapter represents a different perspective on what it might mean to resist educational exclusion in its many forms, and each offers possible ways to make education more inclusive.

How do we articulate the possibilities, limitations and challenges of inclusive schooling and education in African contexts? This book insists that inclusive education cannot be taken for granted. Inclusion is neither a natural nor a given educational practice. It must be struggled for. Bringing a critical perspective to inclusive schooling and education is imperative. This book adds to current educational debates with an African lens. It engages inclusive education from multiple lenses of curriculum content, classroom pedagogy and instruction, representation, culture, environment and the socio-organization life of schools, the pursuit of equity and social justice and the search for educational relevance. It is opined that Africa cannot be left behind in rethinking educational inclusion in ways that evoke critical questions of power, equity and social difference. The question of leaner’s identity in terms of class, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability, language, ethnicity and race are equally consequential for African schooling and education. When inclusion is understood as wholeness of education, then how schooling and education engage the complete learner – her/his body, mind, soul and spirit, as well as the use of local community and Indigenous knowledges in teaching and learning become relevant. Inclusion stands the risk of liberal educational agendas that simply tinker or toy with schooling and education and hardly embrace the challenge of educational change. What we need is a fundamental structural change that ensures schooling and education embraces difference while grappling with the teaching of Indigeneity, decolonization and resistance.