To what extent is the schooling system willing to change to include disabled children?

Abstract

Inclusive education has often been fronted as the panacea in the education of disabled children. Governments have made efforts for disabled children to access schools with their nondisabled counterparts. However, inclusive education should go beyond the mere presence of disabled children in mainstream schools to the participation and achievement of such children. This paper uses the theoretical approach of Disability Studies in Education to explore the extent that the traditional schooling system is willing to go in the pursuit of inclusive education for disabled learners. Can the schooling system change from the current cohort based model to an individual based model?

Keywords:

• Disability studies
• inclusive education
• special education

Introduction

Traditionally, the formal education of disabled children in many countries has been based on the special education paradigm. Special education predominantly uses the medical model of disability that views disability as an individual trait that requires remediation in the person. In this medical model, disabled learners are often viewed as having different learning needs from their nondisabled counterparts (Baglieri and Shapiro 2017). As practised in the United States of America, special education has focused on diagnosis, drawing intervention plans and attempts to correct the perceived anomalies in the individuals with impairments (Valle and Connor 2019). Remarkably, the advent of special education has been, in some ways, progressive as, according to Slee (2018), before special education disabled children were generally seen as uneducable. Those who started special education did not accept that disabled children should be excluded from education. Nonetheless, while the intention of special education was largely positive, its pursuit is problematic.

The problem with special education

Special education has resulted in a further exclusion of disabled learners as they are segregated away from mainstream education. Slee (2018) observes that including disabled learners in education should have been a catalyst for transforming the school system to cater for the needs of learners with diverse needs, not a motivation to provide a separate schooling system that is parallel to the mainstream one. The ‘traditional special education sustains ableist assumptions about disability through longstanding practices of categorisation and separation of children according to deficits. Exclusion is attributed to individual student impairment rather than to the disabling cultures and practices of schooling’ (Slee 2018, 14). Special education’s penchant for measurement and assessment of learners constructs disability in a certain way and hence the learner is seen from a certain perspective, which often leads disabled learners to spend the whole of their school careers in these confines (Connor and Ferri 2007). The model elevates teachers and other special education professionals as the experts in the education, backgrounding the views of the people who experience the disability themselves. In this sense, it promotes a disability expertise (McKenzie and Macleod 2012) where special education professionals use their power to regard disabled learners and their families as if they were objects that lack agency. The approach of Disability Studies in Education (DSE) offers an empowering response to the shortfalls of the special education paradigm, as will be shown below.

Enter disability studies in education

Gabel (2005, 10) defines Disability Studies in Education (DSE) as ‘the use and application of disability studies assumptions and methods to educational issues and problems’. The approach of disability studies locates disability within social and political contexts, and is focused on the civil and human rights of disabled people. Disability, be it physical or psychological, is recognized as a phenomenon imposed by the society, rather than an individual trait of the person. As a social construct, disability gets its meaning in social and cultural contexts (Oliver 1990). Consequently, it is the interaction between the individual with an impairment and the society that brings about disability. When applied to education, the approach of disability studies focuses on addressing the barriers to inclusion of disabled learners in education, such as those related to equity, access, and inclusion in school environments, curricula, and activities.

In addressing the barriers to inclusion of disabled learners, the approach of DSE is driven by the need to uphold the right of disabled learners to be included in education like any other human being. Danforth and Gabel (2006, 1) note that DSE’s approach allows for interrogating ‘rarely questioned assumptions about what disability is; what disabled people need, want, and deserve; and the responsibilities of education and educators in relation to such matters’. The DSE approach ‘offers a departure from the simple, unsophisticated, reductionist rhetoric of special education’s grounding assumptions and its paradigmatic divestment from the social and political worlds where disability is lived amid all its (physical realities)’ (Ware 2011, 248). Using the tenet of ‘nothing about us without us’ (Charlton 2000), the DSE approach views the disabled learners as the experts of their experiences who have crucial knowledge and valid consciousness. Consequently, this approach aims to disrupt the power relations created by the disciplinary power of special education that leads to treating disabled learners as ‘subjects for investigation, surveillance and treatment, a representation that has negative moral and political consequences because it involves various forms of medicalization, objectification, confinement, and exclusion’ (Skrtic 2005, 149).

According to Skrtic (2005), the goal is not only to disrupt the power relations in the education of disabled learners, but also to deconstruct such relations and the social categories they create, by uncovering inconsistencies, contradictions as well as the silences in the functionalist knowledge tradition of special education. The DSE approach follows this up by propagating alternative ways of interpreting special education and student disability. The aim ‘is to encourage special educators to reconstruct their practices and discourses using interpretations that promote the values of democracy, community, participation, and inclusion’ (Skrtic 2005, 149). With this in mind, the approach of DSE shifts the focus of intervention from the need to fix the individual with the disability to that of transforming the classroom and the entire education context to address the needs of the individual disabled learner and, indeed, all individual learners.

Inclusive education according to DSE

Addressing the needs of all individual learners means that the approach of DSE has an idealistic component. According to Skrtic (2005), the vision is of a time when the disability category is no longer required in schools; when the binary of ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ learners is no longer needed. A day is envisaged when the education system no longer treats disability as a problem, but as a diversity that gives an enduring source of uncertainty, consequently becoming the driving force behind a growth of knowledge and, ultimately, progress (Gallagher, Connor, and Ferri 2014; Skrtic 1995). Towards this goal, Skrtic (2005) argues for the need to reconstitute the school as a ‘learning community’, with strong democratic principles that allow for engagements between educators and community stakeholders in discourses that are foregrounded on the need to give desirable life conditions to learners as future citizens. Therefore, using the DSE approach, disabled learners in the education system are seen as another form of diversity, not as an abnormal category that needs fixing.

The disability category is produced through a normalizing judgment that characterizes disabled people using a deficit of bodily integrity that invalidates their social position (Tremain 2015). While the medical model of disability employed by traditional special education interprets disability as an unavoidable outcome of impairment, the social model of disability favoured by DSE looks at disability as a type of oppression against the individual with an impairment (Hughes 2015). Whereas special education might aim at including the disabled learner in the mainstream education classroom after normalization or with remediation, the approach of DSE views inclusion in education as a civil right for the disabled learners. Accordingly, Gallagher, Connor, and Ferri (2014) call for abandoning the deficit model thinking in education. Skrtic (1995) observes that a system that focuses on producing ‘normal’ students is simultaneously engaged in producing learners who are seen as not fitting in the system, learners who thus become a ‘problem’ population. Such a system is bound to consider disability as a problem instead of focusing on how all learners can be served. Thus, instead of special education, the approach of DSE favours inclusive education. In this case, inclusion of learners is more than a placement or instructional issue. It is a moral and a political issue.

Using the DSE approach, the motivation for providing inclusive education to disabled learners does not stand or fall on the capacity of the disabled learners, but on the school’s ability to remove structural barriers to inclusion. The work by Elder in Kenya offers a good example of how inclusion committees at the school can successfully enhance the inclusion of disabled learners in schools through identifying and removing barriers (Elder 2015; Elder, Damiani, and Okongo 2016; Elder and Kuja 2019). Elder (2015, 25) observes that, ‘Students, parents, teachers, administrators, and government officials need to collaborate together within their local communities and identify the strengths and barriers of their local educational systems. A plan of action is needed, building on inclusive strengths and removing barriers to inclusion’. Elder (2015) goes ahead to give the strengths of implementation of inclusive education in Kenya as: well trained teachers, schools that receive the stipulated minimum support from the government, and the presence of local laws and domesticated international instruments favouring inclusive education, among other factors. Elder (2015) gives the barriers as poverty, gender, lack of access to health care, lack of access to food and clean drinking water, negative attitudes towards disability, lack of ability and diversity awareness, and a general shortage of teachers for both mainstream and special education, among other issues. Given such challenges, it appears that, for inclusive education to be realised, there is need for more fundamental changes that go beyond just placing disabled children in mainstream classrooms.

The need for change

Apart from the examples of barriers cited by Elder (2015) above, there could be need to consider the extent the schooling system is willing to change in the pursuit of inclusive education for disabled learners. For example, the current schooling system is largely based on a cohort model where learners are grouped together according to some pre-set criteria (such as age, years spent in the school, and so forth) and instructed using a predetermined curriculum. However, when a predetermined curriculum is used, disabled children could face exclusion in the mainstream classroom in the same way it is happening in the special school, as they might be perceived as incapable of meeting the normalized targets in the curriculum (Baglieri et al. 2011; Veurink 2017). As a result, inclusive education might require recognising the individual strengths and weaknesses that learners, including disabled ones, bring into the education system in order to provide individualised instruction. In such an arrangement, there is little space for the consumption of a predetermined curriculum by learners in a particular cohort (Baglieri et al. 2011). Therefore, the extent that the traditional system of education is willing to change, from cohort-based to individual based, could be an important factor in the pursuit of inclusive education.

From the foregoing discussion, it can be seen that mere placing of disabled learners in the same classroom with nondisabled learners might not suffice in the pursuit of inclusive education. If the mainstream classroom is based on the need for learners to meet some predetermined standard in the curriculum, that classroom will not be different from the current special education system where ‘abnormal learners’ are left behind because of their perceived bodily deficits. The approach of DSE offers an opportunity to rethink the prevailing practice of special education as well as the discourse of inclusive education, with the goal of strategizing on how disability as a form of diversity can be included in the education system.

Conclusion

In sum, the approach of DSE leads to recognising disability as a result of the interaction between the person’s impairment with the environment—which in this context focuses on the education system. In this way, disabled learners’ success in education is not determined solely by their impairment but rather by the interaction of their impairment with the education system. There is need for more fundamental changes in the traditional schooling system that will lead to recognition of the individual strengths and weaknesses of learners rather than relying on predetermined curriculum targets that are external from the individual. This calls to attention the limits of change that the current schooling system is willing to undergo in the pursuit of inclusive education. Could the cohort model of the schooling system give way to a more individualized model?

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research is funded by the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences in collaboration with the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (Grant ID: APS16/1046) and University of Cape Town, Health Sciences Faculty Research Committee Postgraduate Publication Incentive.