Inclusive Education in South Africa and the Developing World

The Search for an Inclusive Pedagogy

Sigamoney Manicka Naicker

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781787541306
• eBook ISBN: 9781787439627
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

This book offers policy makers, teachers and teacher trainers a framework for understanding inclusive education in the developing world. 

With a major focus on South Africa, it argues that planning for inclusive education must rupture old theories, assumptions, models and tools - including a recognition of how the history of special education has psychologized failure - with the mainstream taking ownership of the transformation to a fairer system. The author contends that for inclusive education to take hold, policy makers need to contextualize the curriculum to the needs of the developing country, and to place the vulnerable and working class demographic at the heart of the planning process - recognizing that the performative culture of developed countries will marginalize and alienate this majority group.

Providing practical guidelines on developing full-service schools that can cater for learners who experience a range of barriers to learning, Inclusive Education in South Africa and the Developing World will be of great value to all those with an interest in education, inclusion and social justice both within South Africa and beyond.

CHAPTER 1

INCLUSIVE EDUCATION IN THE DEVELOPING WORLD

Despite the rhetoric of inclusive education in the developing world, South Africa is the only country that has introduced a White Paper 6 on Special Needs Education: Building an Inclusive Education and Training System at a national level. Thus, South Africa, despite several shortcomings, has made a significant attempt to change the system towards an inclusive education system. Many interventions have taken place in other developing countries (Juma & Lehtomäki, 2015; Juma, Lehtomäki, & Naukkarinen, 2017; Mukhopadhyay, Nenty, & Abosi, 2012; McConkey & Mariga, 2011; Pather & Nxumalo, 2012; Westbrook & Alison, 2015). These interventions are often the result of international co-operation agreements that focus on piecemeal changes in the system. Whilst these interventions can be appreciated and the enthusiasm and commitment of the international consultants are admirable, they have not resulted in transforming many of these countries sufficiently. In fact, the major challenge is that these interventions have not taken the theory and practice of inclusion seriously. In these countries which include Ethiopia, Tanzania and Zanzibar which form a part of Tanzania, Botswana and Swaziland, there is a close association with special education which is a serious impediment to inclusive education. For inclusion to take place in these countries and South Africa, the special education model has to be ruptured. The central theme of this book deals with the theory and practice of inclusive education. It offers a framework to developing countries on how theories, assumptions, practices and tools need to change to develop a truly inclusive education and training system. Chapter 1 includes an analyses of inclusive education in the developing world with major focus on South Africa. Chapter 2 speaks to the issue of the importance of understanding the history of special education in attempting to deliver an inclusive system, making specific reference to South Africa. Chapter 3 explains the ideology of inclusive education and how the poor and vulnerable children can be brought to the centre of the education system. Chapter 4 discusses the issue of paradigm shifts and the theory of inclusive education. Chapter 5 makes practical recommendations with regard to developing an inclusive education system.

1.1. WHY INCLUSIVE EDUCATION IS IMPORTANT TO DEVELOPING CONTEXTS

Very little has been done in mass education systems since it was introduced for working class children and vulnerable children in developing and poor countries. When developed nations plan, they plan for the middle class because they are the majority. Developing countries, following this model, also plan for the middle class, but the majority of children in developing countries are working class, poor and vulnerable. This action further marginalises the working class. Whilst this chapter is contradictory in suggesting a first world inclusive model, the position of this book is that you cannot throw the baby out with the bathwater. There is enormous merit in following the inclusion model as it holds promise for working class children and vulnerable children who constitute themajority population in developing countries schooling systems.

1.2. WHAT ARE DEVELOPING COUNTRIES?

Developing nations are those with low, lower middle or upper middle incomes. Common characteristics of developing countries are low levels of living characterized by low income, inequality, poor health and inadequate education; a general sense of malaise and hopelessness (Nielsen, 2011).

Developing countries are poor. By definition, GDP and Per Capita Income are at a low level. The general living standard of people in these countries is very low. Poverty is visibly disturbing every aspect of life. General health services for people is insignificant. The life expectancy at birth does not exceed 60 years in many countries. As a result, the living standard of the people of such countries is also very low. People have difficulty in consuming even daily necessity (Nielsen, 2011). South Africa’s average salary data are skewed by large levels of inequality, and exclude the large informal sector. For example, domestic workers, of which there are over 1 million employed in South Africa, earn approximately R2,500 per month – this equates to just over $5,160 per year. Stats SA’s (2017) latest data also show that South Africa has more domestic workers in employment than it has professionals, currently making up 6.2% of the country’s 16.2 million person workforce. Professionals make up 5.5%, with the gap between the two groups widening every quarter. South Africa also has an incredibly high unemployment rate, with 27.7% of workers out of a job – and by the broader definition putting it over 36%.

South Africa has largely followed developed models of education which have a totally different pupil composition. Planning for the poor and working class can be done effectively if we use the concept inclusive education as a framework of thinking and practice. The underlying principle of inclusive education is to examine what barriers exist in the system that prevent learners from learning and address those barriers in planning rather than psychologizing failure. There is scope in education during the formative years to take into consideration different intelligences that learners possess. In the current system, anyone who fails is regarded as having deficiencies. The argument of inclusive education is what barriers exist in the system that prevents success, and each of these barriers requires an assessment in order to create the conditions for learners to learn. The mainstream of education should take ownership of inclusive education and commit to system change. Whilst the White Paper was introduced in South Africa and inclusive pedagogies were introduced in other developing countries, there has not been a systemic change. It is only with systemic change that the benefits of inclusive education can be realized.

The main thrust of this book is that developing countries should embrace an inclusive ideology that results in radical changes to theory, assumptions, models and practices. Developing countries have not brought the marginalised and alienated to the centre of the education system including South Africa. For example, in many African countries, pilot projects and changes to teaching practices has been the norm (McConkey & Mariga, 2011; Juma et al., 2015). In South Africa, a White Paper has been launched on inclusive education. In South Africa, special education units that are called inclusive education components implement inclusive education. The point of departure of an inclusive system is that the mainstream of education should own the transformation. The mainstream of education should examine every barrier to learning and find solutions for that, for example, disaggregate the various effects of poverty, establish how language can be an impediment to learning, develop responses to poorly educated parents and curriculum development should be contextualized within the specificities of countries. There should be a clear understanding of how the history of special education has psychologized failure and influenced the thinking of mainstream bureaucrats and educationists. Vulnerable children in South Africa remain in the margins and will continue to occupy positions in the margins of society in the developing world.

Inclusive education must be accompanied by structural change and programmatic changes. This type of transformation will assist in embracing large numbers of children who are alienated from the mainstream as a result of socio-economic challenges and challenges related to the performance culture that is driven by the World Bank, OECD and other supra national organisations (Liasidou, 2016). The performative culture encouraged by these organisations create the conditions for instability, violence and conflict-ridden societies. Too many children in developing countries become part of high attrition and perform poorly in literacy and numeracy because the focus is on top performers. To build better and more stable societies, we need to develop a nurturing supportive culture in education instead of our obsession with performance. Developing countries cannot compare themselves with other countries in the Western world. In those countries, children in the margins are experiencing great difficulty in school and often are placed in special education facilities. Unfortunately, in developing countries, as mentioned earlier, there is a substantial number of children who are sitting in the margins. Ideas from the World Bank and related organisations often do not hold in developing nations. We need to develop a safety net for children as this is not possible in many of their homes. For example, children who constitute ‘the other’ are overrepresented in special education in the UK and many accuse the US education system of creating schools as a pipeline to prison.

My sense is that developing countries should examine their contexts and find ways to keep children in school so that they do not become victims of the brutal neo-liberalism economic system where the majority of people struggle to find jobs. Responses should be found for children to succeed in reading and writing, especially, in the formative years so that conditions are created for children to graduate from school. We know that if children do not learn to read by the age of 6, they are unlikely to complete schooling. When developing nations opt for a performative culture, they tend to take care of the top performers and the more privileged learners in the schooling system. The weak and vulnerable will be lost and never find a place in mainstream economic and social life. We have to develop a safety net for vulnerable children in the formative years Grade R to Grade 4.

Now what is an inclusive ideology and what are the assumptions, models and tools that are associated with this practice?

According to Pather et al. (2012), inclusion is a term that emerged in the late 1950s in response to criticisms of segregated institutions by disabled people, which resulted in separation of disabled children from their family, peers and local communities (Hodgkinson, 2016). However, we are not only talking about disabled learners here, we are referring to all learners, particularly those who are working class and find it difficult to interact with a middle class curriculum. The disability movement as a political movement aided by a growth of disability studies to aid this movement led to a subsequent shift in thinking from a medical model of viewing impairment as the only cause of educational difficulties to a social model of examining social processes and factors which result in difficulties (Norwich, 2013). The focus is on addressing cultural, ideological and material forces, which generate and legitimate policies and practices on exclusion for all learners (Armstrong, Armstrong, & Barton, 2000). The shift is away from categorizing and pathologising some learners, for example, those with socio-economic challenges, as being the ‘other’ and to focusing on all forms of marginalization and exclusion based on gender, ethnicity, cultural background, sexuality and physical, cultural and material recourses (Nind & Vinha, 2003). Inclusive education therefore calls for ‘restorative practice’, school transformation and renovation to address exclusion and not simply move children into unchanged institutions (Slee, 2011).

If we apply the notion of inclusion to learners who struggle in the mainstream, we can revolutionise our schooling systems. We know that learners who do not experience success in the mainstream find their lack of success psychologized. Instead, every developing country should examine all the barriers in the system that make it difficult for learners to succeed.

It follows from the discussion above that changing to an inclusive education system requires a paradigmatic shift from a dual to a single system. South Africa has developed a white paper but has put into place special education units to take control of inclusive education. Instead, the mainstream of education should have taken responsibility. In this way, educationplanning would have taken responsibility for all vulnerable children. At this time, vulnerable children remain at the margins of schools and society.

1.3. SOUTH AFRICA

South Africa is a developing country with huge disparities derived from the apartheid dispensation. Many people do not have adequate educational qualifications and relevant skills, unemployment is very high and large numbers live in poverty. To contribute to breaking the cycle of disadvantage, there is a need to ensure that all children receive quality education from a very early age. Impoverished families are generally unable to provide adequate resources at home for their children to achieve school readiness. Poverty, combined with parents’low level of education, contributes to learner underachievement. One of the White Papers launched in South Africa was Education White Paper 6 on Special Needs Education: Building an Inclusive Education and Training System. However, this paper was not implemented at a structural and programmatic level leaving many poor learners in the same situation they were when arriving at school on the first day. Planning and development of the inclusive system should bring the vulnerable child to the centre of the system and planning should take place accordingly. Planning and delivery should be based on the barriers to learning framework that is discussed later on in this book.

The Western Cape has been selected as a suitable example in this discussion as it is the second richest province. A closer look at the education profile in the Western Cape, the second wealthiest province in South Africa, provides a bleak picture. According to the Human Capital Development Strategy (2007, p. 10) developed by the provincial Department of Education, only 23.4% of the population of learners in the Western Cape complete Grade 12. Over a third (36.5%) drop out during the secondary school phase; a small proportion complete primary education (7.9%). Fifteen per cent (15.2%) of the latter figure drop out during the primary phase. At least 5.7% of the total learner population have no schooling at all. Enrolment and completion of schooling by the age of 17 years is highest amongst white learners (100%); the enrolment and completion rate is lower amongst the African population, and the lowest amongst coloured learners. For those learners currently at school, only 37% of learners at Grade 3 level achieve grade-appropriate literacy and numeracy levels. At Grade 6 level, numeracy performance drops to 15%, and literacy performance to 35%. These statistics are alarming if we consider that the education sector receives 38.1% of the total provincial budget (Human Capital Development Strategy, 2007, p. 10).

Against the backdrop of the apartheid legacy, it is evident that the most disadvantaged learners are black and thus experience the least success in the education system. Yet, after 15 years of funding education on a pro-poor basis with the emphasis on equity, it seems very little has been achieved. According to the OECD (2008, p. 53), three international learning assessments of the outcomes of South African schooling, the Monitoring Learning Achievement (MLA) project conducted in 1999, Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMMS) conducted in 1995, 1999 and 2003 and the Southern Eastern African Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality (SAQMEC) completed in 1991, confirm that South Africans are performing poorly and the education system is not delivering quality education. The high dropout rate and the low pass rates in literacy and numeracy suggest that much still has to be done. A guiding principle of the National Curriculum Statement for South African schools is social justice (DOE, 2001). Both literacy and numeracy are social justice issues, as a lack of literacy and numeracy excludes one from mainstream economic and social life (Bearne & Marsh, 2007). Teaching young children literacy and numeracy through ECD establishes a sound base for learning and is an important strategy to reach the goal of social justice.

The socio-economic conditions in families determine, to a large extent, the quality of learning environment at home. Statistics that focus on the Western Cape illustrate this point. According to the Provincial Economic Review and Outlook research (2007, p. 5), 25.5% of people in the Western Cape are unemployed. A further analysis of the data indicates the following:

• Between the ages of 15 and 24, 49.1% are unemployed.
• Between the ages of 25 and 34, 23.7% are unemployed.
• Between the ages of 35 and 44, 18.1% are unemployed.
• Between the ages of 45 and 54, 13.1% are unemployed.

Thus, a large percentage of younger parents who are likely to have young children are unemployed. These homes have limited educational resources and lack a print culture, and early literacy is minimal. This implies few books, little interest in school work and a lack of a reading and oral language culture.

Changing from a dual system of education (special and ordinary) to an inclusive system of education requires substantial change in terms of thinking and practices. After 20 years of implementing Education White Paper 6 (DOE, 2001), it is very important that theories, assumptions, practices, models and tools are put under immense scrutiny for the inclusive policy to work. The single system of education should develop the capacity to address barriers to learning if it wants to include all learners into the education system. What are the main barriers that deprive learners access to a single system of education and what changes should take place so that a truly inclusive system can be created? These include (1) language, (2) negative attitudes, (3) socio-economic factors, (4) parental attitude, (5) lack of appropriate and clear policy, (6) access to the curriculum and (7) lack of access to a print culture. These barriers are discussed as an ideological framework as a chapter later on in this book.

South Africa introduced seven white papers in education but they were all implemented in ways that were not entirely influenced by the theory and practice of inclusive education. Inclusive education requires of the system to change at a structural level so that the mainstream of education takes ownership of the ideology and practice of inclusive education. This should bring about consistency in relation to other white papers, for example, curriculum development, early childhood education, adult education and other areas of education. This chapter suggests that in implementing inclusive education, South Africa did not take seriously the various barriers, such as the curriculum in providing access to learners who experience barriers.

The social portrait of South Africa based on its second richest city suggests that a substantial part of the pupil population could benefit from an inclusive education system. Too many learners in the country remain in the margins of society as a result of historical factors such race and class.

1.4. DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

Inclusive Education, according to McConkey, Mariga, and Myezwa (2014), is perceived as being practically challenging in low-income countries like those in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). In 2011, nearly 30 million children in SSA were not attending school at all and over half of those children who attended primary school did not learn the basic reading andwriting skills by Grade 4 (UNESCO, 2013, 2014). Concerning inclusive education, many countries in this region benefit from foreign donors who are involved in micro inclusive education projects. There is no systemic change and formal national inclusive policy that results in system change at a country level. The position of this book is that given the socio-economic and related challenges, developing countries will benefit tremendously from a single inclusive system. This inclusive system could have enormous benefits for literacy and numeracy levels, throughput and access to teaching and learning.

1.5. ETHIOPIA

Pather and Nxumalo (2012) sum up the situation of inclusive education in Ethiopia. There appears to be a few inclusion projects in Ethiopia but there is an overwhelming special education practice. The question remains: has ‘Ethiopia’s SNE strategy pushed beyond the boundaries of integration to offer a world of inclusion’ (Franck & Joshi, 2017, p. 357), and the answer appears to be no because of the attitudes of the community and teachers and the lack of material and technical resources (Franck & Joshi, 2017). There is not sufficient evidence as there is a dearth of literature on inclusive education and its implementation in Ethiopia. However, some of the challenges highlighted in the few available sources point to the resistance of teachers to include children with disabilities into mainstream classrooms (Beyene & Tizazu, 2010). They believe children with disabilities are better served in separate institutions with specialist teachers. Mainstreaming has also not been accompanied by reorganization of the mainstream school, its curriculum and teaching and learning strategies (UNESCO, 2005, as cited in Tilahun, 2007). Lack of training, availability of support, materials and equipment and large class sizes all contribute to the challenges. Negative community attitudes towards disability and inclusive education also compound the issue (IDDC, 1998, as cited in Tirussew, 1999).

In recognition of the constraints and challenges facing the inclusion of children in schools, the Special Needs/Inclusive Education Strategy proposed a model which included Support Centres/Resource Centres (RCs) to improve schools’ competencies to manage individual differences and support needs as well as through inter-sectorial cooperation. The Special Needs Strategy had a target of establishing 800 RCs in Ethiopia by the end of the year 2020, and the 2008–2012 project funded by the Finnish government established nine Resources Centres across four regions as well as a Special Education Teacher Training Centre in Sebeta. Based on a review of this project, a subsequent project was designed with two strategic options focusing on the implementation of the new SNE/IE strategy of 2012 and supporting implementation of SNE/IE in RCs and s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Chapter 1 Inclusive Education in the Developing World
• Chapter 2 The History of Special Education and the Challenges for Inclusive Education
• Chapter 3 Changing Consciousness
• Chapter 4 The Education Landscape of Developing Countries and the Need for the Ideology of Inclusive Education: Barriers to Learning
• Chapter 5 Practical Recommendations for Developing an Inclusive Education System
• Bibliography
• Index