Abstract
The article proposes the need for the decolonising of the inclusive education movement in Southern African educational contexts. It draws on the authors’ own research and reflexive engagement over the last five years on inclusive education policy formulation and implementation in selected Southern African contexts, namely, Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, and Malawi. The article interrogates inclusive education policy enactment in the four country contexts through the lens of the theory of practice architectures, focusing mainly on the ‘sayings’ and ‘performings.’ The analysis highlights that discourses of inclusive education, which continue to be influenced by traditional special education ideologies from the global North and appropriated by the South have the power to undermine or subvert the inclusive education agenda in contexts shaped by neo-colonialism. The article argues for a critical inclusive education agenda located within social justice theory to enable the decolonising of inclusive education. The reflexive and ethical stance of a social justice framework has the power to identify, untangle and disrupt pervasive special education notions from the North, and challenge education administrators, school leaders at all levels and teachers to engage in ideological critique as they enact inclusive education policy and seek to address exclusion and oppression within the education system. Keywords: African contexts; critical diversity literacy; decolonisation; inclusive education; practice architectures; social justice education
Highlights
Over the past decade or so, there have been global calls for the decolonisation of education in countries of the South (e.g. Higgs, 2012; Le Grange, 2016; Sayed, Motala & Hoffman, 2017)
We explore some of the tensions in inclusive education policy implementation and practices in four African country contexts, through a decolonisation lens
The questions that emerge are: how do we resist and disrupt the language and meanings of traditional Western special education in inclusive education policy implementation? Our research suggests that most teachers in the country case studies have an un-reflexive ideological orientation towards hegemonic special education notions and understandings, in particular the pervasive labelling of learners
Summary
Over the past decade or so, there have been global calls for the decolonisation of education in countries of the South (e.g. Higgs, 2012; Le Grange, 2016; Sayed, Motala & Hoffman, 2017). Decolonisation is a contested concept as former colonies have varied and diverse experiences of colonisation, producing different knowledge systems and multiple meanings within the decolonisation discourse. The key argument made is that decolonisation of education is a crucial movement to enable a shift from Western discourses about the nature of knowledge, knowing and meaning making. Hadebe (2017) explains that the decolonising agenda aims to critique, reformulate and re-envision power, knowledge and change. This would entail using a decolonisation lens to engage in critique of the sources of knowledge we are accessing and appropriating. Hadebe (2017) further explains that coloniality as a concept expresses the perpetuation of colonialism in different forms, in former colonies post-independence. Coloniality is the pervasive often hidden power structure that maintains and entrenches relations of domination, exploitation and oppression long after direct colonialism has been disrupted
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