Contributions from: Monica Pereira dos Santos - Brazil, Nithi Muthukrishna - South Africa and Mithu Alur - India Marie Schoeman - South Africa, Thabi Ntombela, Sulochini Jairaj, Yvonne Mooke, Prudence Small, Mmakobo Mosotho.
Abstract
This symposium reports on the work of the first year of a collaborative, research, development and dissemination project linking expertise within four countries to promote sustainable development and devise transferable models of inclusion policy and practice. A paper will be presented from each country which reflects the different form that the project is taking in each, in responding to local circumstances. Researchers within each country are working within one or two small development areas (two in India and South Africa) containing a small number of schools, and collaborating with teaching staff, local administrators, learners and communities to analyse barriers to learning and participation within each area, identify priorities for development and introduce development activities. In all countries local and national administration have been involved in the project and the intention is to contribute to local and national policy as well as local practice. The projects involve the dissemination of instructive practice in workshops and conferences, to a progressively wider group of people locally and nationally, of the ways barriers to learning are being addressed in each development area. The first phase of the project has been supported by UNESCO and the DfEE.
Developing Sustainable Inclusive Education Policy and Practice at
District Level: A pilot project in South Africa
Nithi Muthukrishna,
Marie Schoeman, Thabi Ntombela & Razi Jairaj.
This paper presents a research and development project in two provinces in South Africa that is aimed at developing sustainable inclusive education policy and practice. In the project, inclusive education is defined as the processes of increasing the participation of students in, and reducing their exclusion from cultures, curricula, and communities of local centres of learning. In each of the provinces, a cluster of schools in one district is involved in the project. The two districts that have been selected are respectively urban disadvantaged and rural disadvantaged. A range of factors which impact on effective teaching and learning can, therefore, be observed in order to get a overview of the widely divergent conditions in post-Apartheid South African schools and communities. Experiences in this pilot project documented over a one-year period will be examined. A careful analysis will be made of the processes involved in how the project began, interaction with provincial and district education departments, links with community structures; the analysis of inclusionary and exclusionary factors in each school and community; and the setting of priorities for development. Finally, the paper will provide insights into some of the development work that has begun. In exploring practices, the paper will give particular attention to issues of context and meaning.
Exploring Barriers to Learning and Development: The South African
Experience
Marie Schoeman
In many ways South Africa faces unique problems and challenges as far as educational reform is concerned. Since the first democratic elections in 1994, there has been a commitment on the part of Government to transform this extremely segregated society and its value systems. To create the conditions for a more tolerant, equitable and fair society, different kinds of exclusionary practices had to be addressed. In the field of "Special Needs Education", current policy reforms clearly indicate a shift away from the notion of Learners with Special Needs to Addressing Barriers to Learning and Development - i.e. a shift away from seeing the needs within the learners towards addressing systemic barriers. In Africa basic education for all learners is severely constrained by barriers such as lack of resources, inadequate teaching, poverty, socio-economic deprivation, disease (e.g. HIV/AIDS), and various cultural and traditional forces. In South Africa these barriers are multiplied by other factors such as high levels of crime and violence (particularly woman and child abuse), learning in a language other than your mother tongue, and political and racial tensions. In fact, one of the most glaring barriers is the extreme inequality of provisioning and support.
Over the past three years the Gauteng Department of Education (as part of a collaborative international research project with partners in India, Brazil and England) has been working within an organisational model which has focused on the redeployment of specialised support in mainstream schools. This is being accomplished by setting up school based support teams as a first tier of intervention. This approach utilises all available community resources, while playing an important role in the paradigm shift towards Inclusion. Moreover, it resonates well with the traditionally strong African sense of community life ("Ubuntu" and joint problem solving), thus making it a most appropriate vehicle for change. Training of teachers has focused on a new curricular approach (Curriculum 2005) which is learner centred and outcomes based, and consequently much more accommodating of learner diversity than the previous approach. Although the majority of disabled learners' needs are not yet being addressed by the education system, and many are still being excluded from education altogether, the transition towards Inclusive Education has become one of the single most important means of transforming a society plagued for so long by intolerance and discrimination.
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