Education of people with disabilities: a capability-context framework of culture

Abstract

People with disabilities find themselves at the margins of ideas on education in the rights-based and the agency-focused frameworks (the capability approach). This article socially situates the rights-based framework to extend agency as an educational opportunity to make it participatory in cross-cultural contexts, and individually locates the agency-focused framework to enhance agency as multi-dimensional educational experience-outcome journeys across cultural contexts. This extended scope of rights and enhanced capacity of agency is advanced as the capability-context framework of culture. The framework focuses on analytically distinct yet connected emerging agents with capabilities of both dialogical discourses (retrospective reflexivity – macro-mechanisms) and dialectic narratives (bounded participation – micro-structures), which can provide access to deep social structures, and their many ways of being (micro-mechanisms) and specific ways of doing (macro-structures) that enable, but also disable the social choices of people with disabilities, to open new possibilities for them, and for all across contexts.

Keywords:

• Education
• disability
• human diversity
• culture

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to the anonymous referees for their efforts and contributions throughout the editorial process.

Notes

1. The Global North refers to the 57 countries categorised by the United Nations to have a high human development index rating. These countries are largely in the Northern Hemisphere, and are broadly referred to as rich and developed countries (Brandt 1980).

2. The Global South includes countries of the rest of the world – the marginalised majority that has low human development ranking and is predominantly located in the Southern Hemisphere. These countries are poor, low-income, developing countries, most of which are bound by their colonial past (Brandt 1980).