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Inclusive Education in African Contexts
A Critical Reader
Series:
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.
"One cannot go through this book without critically reflecting on its dense and rich content, and its empirical style in conveying this complex message on inclusive education in African contexts. [...] I can recommend
Inclusive Education in African Contexts as an excellent study due to the fact that it has succeeded in digging deep into some crucial issues of inclusion and exclusion in Africa. The way the chapters are presented and their sequence benefit the reader, not only to maintain his/her understanding of inclusive education in African contexts, but also to raise critical questions about the situation as a whole." - Ali Ait Si Mhamed,
Graduate School of Education, Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan, in:
International Review of Education (2019) 65: 331–335
Educational Researchers and their students