The demand for inclusive education has increased and fostered major changes to schooling and education, where learners with disabilities are taught alongside their peers within the local community. For this reason, schools are required to adapt fast to accommodate and support a diverse group of learners with a variety of needs drawing from both the Eurocentric and African perspectives. As inequality and exclusion are produced systematically, they can be tackled head on. Drawing from the critical disability theory, this chapter shows that although learners can be different, they all need to be provided with access and equal opportunities in schools. Accommodating learners with diverse backgrounds and disabilities; and working together to build a common future, is a core value of an inclusive society. When social inclusion is promoted, cycles of exclusion and traditional blockades (structural and perceived), begin to dismantle.
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Globally, the introduction of inclusive education brought a shift in the paradigm of thinking in education and the society at large. The establishment and maintenance of a social world where everyone experience inclusive values and relationships is the pinnacle of inclusion (Kuknor & Bhattacharya, 2022). As a result, social values and practices that influence human beings to support human rights are enhanced in inclusion. However, the social model of disability highlights the struggle of learners living with disabilities to attain human rights in educational settings.
Inclusive education supports the social model and is meant to promote inclusiveness in all aspects of human life. Although the inclusion of learners living with disabilities is promoted globally in the last few decades, a common goal behind inclusive education should be to maximise social participation in a regular educational setting (Article 24 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with a Disability, United Nations, 2006). Social participation is an important condition to gather knowledge and to develop social skills while interacting with peers (Pepler & Bierman, 2018). As a result, educational settings bear the mandate to ensure that students living with disabilities are accepted by their classmates; there is interaction between students living with disabilities and their classmates and they play together; students living with disabilities and those without disabilities form social relationships; students living with disabilities feel accepted. When such measures are not put in place in educational settings, students living with disabilities will continue to be marginalised and unable to participate in society.
Social participation does not always occur naturally for students living with disabilities (Simplican, Leader, Kosciulek, Leahy, 2015). Increased opportunities should be created for such students. However, studies have shown that students living with disabilities experience difficulties of social participation in regular education settings as compared to their peers (Schwab, Lindner, Helm, Hamel & Markus, 2022). As a result, their sense of belonging, self-image, motivation and overall performance in school and beyond can become negatively affected. Consequently, when the social participation of students living with disabilities is limited, there will be no or few opportunities for them fully participate in society.
The attitudes of society towards students living with disabilities influence their social participation (Louw, Kirkpatrick & Leader, 2020). Similarly, students' attitudes towards their peers with disabilities are also believed to be strongly influenced by their degree of knowledge about disabilities (Papadakaki, Maraki, Bitsakos & Chliaoutakis, 2022). And, the relationship between the attitudes of the entire society and the social participation of students living with disabilities has been established in several studies. As a result, attitudes also promote the social participation of students living with disabilities. From an early age, students develop the awareness of social categories which may lead to the emergence of explicit biases in favour of one's own category (Rhodes & Baron, 2019; Spitzman & Balconi, 2019). The implication is that students can start to develop negative attitudes from early age, especially towards people who are visibly different. Furthermore, their attitudes are also shaped by their direct and indirect experiences with peers, parents, family, community, and teachers.