The ManicaPost
Shelton Mwanyisa
Emerging Issues in Education
ONE person with a disability noted that the entire human race is essentially disabled because we are unable to live together in peace, something that has always been so, and will continue to be so in the future unless the negative attitude is addressed.
Living with disabilities is hard. Living with disabilities in a society that discriminates against learners with disabilities is even worse.
Learners living with disabilities continue to be denied their right to self-assertion, identity and development.
Welcome to the column: Emerging Issues in Education.
This week we focus on the deconstruction of the social construction of disability through the reconstruction of the attitude of the school and the society towards learners living with disabilities.
What is attitude?
Social scientists regard attitude as a mental state of readiness organised through experience, exerting influence on an individuals’ response to all objects and situations with which it is related.
Attitude has psychosocial reference in its origins in that it is inherent in the individual and is intimately enmeshed in behaviour and psychological make-up.
Therefore, attitudes can only be inferred from what a person says and does.
What the school says and does with the learners living with disabilities will have a direct bearing on their learning and development.
What is disability?
Disability is a relative term in so far as different cultures define their norms of being and doing differently.
Conceptions of disability are therefore highly contextual and subjective.
Disability can be understood to be an individual limitation to physical and cognitive function resulting from impairment.
In every single way that matters, disability does not change a person.
Instead, disability threatens the self concepts and who a person is impacts on their ability to adjust to the condition.
The most prevalent types of disability are related to seeing, walking, hearing, and remembering.
Attitudes that promote inclusion of learners with disabilities in schools
Access to school
The inclusive education policy, not only calls for the integration of learners with disabilities, but also accepting and enrolling them.
Inclusion is a children’s rights issue and schools are expected to be child friendly.
Inclusive education is argued to improve the condition of learners with disabilities.
In light of the problems facing people with disabilities particularly children it is important that schools respond to the calls of inclusion and not only enrol but attend to the needs and interest of learners living with disabilities.
Research shows that fewer individuals with disabilities have ever attended formal education and are more exposed to abuses if compared to their counterparts living without disabilities.
Cooperation
Merely including learners with disabilities without involving them is not inclusion.
Social scientists have known that able-bodied people tend to avoid interacting with people with disabilities, because they are uncertain about how to behave in their presence.
Every individual has an inherent capacity to be loved or belong to a group. With reference to educational management, a sense of belonging can be developed by involving the learners with disabilities through use of collaborative pedagogic approaches.
Collaborative approaches being an accepted member of the class and school.
On this account it can be viewed that the inability exposed by the people with disabilities is actually the inability of the society to accommodate the learners.
Equal opportunities
It is very sad to note that people with disabilities have to grapple with the deprivation of opportunities in all aspects of life, including access to essential services.
It is important to allow learners with disabilities to participate in events and activities they are interested in.
Inclusive education is not about changing the learners with disabilities but adjusting and modifying the curriculum to meet their needs.
The stigma and discrimination that people with disabilities face reduces the participation of the people with disabilities chances to do like everyone else.
There are several such examples of people who proved that disability is not inability.
Salif Keita the world’s famous musician has defied the odds by countering the condition of albinism and rose to the greater heights in the arts.
What makes Keita worth noting is the international community has embraced his lyrics.
The late Paul Matavire made a remarkable demonstration that visual impairment does not unable if opportunity and support is provided.
Positive self concept
As a result of inclusivity teachers are expected to treat all learners as persons of worth.
Teachers should therefore try to be positive as they interact with learners with disabilities, so as to build a positive self-concept in them.
It is to a greater extent how the teachers react to individual learners that can promote or discourage stigma and discrimination.
Being a good role model also facilitates acquisition of acceptable norms and values.
Therefore, teachers’ behaviour ought to be in congruence with the way they expect all learners to treat each other.
Labelling and discrimination leads to feelings of inadequacy and anxiety combined with insecurity and frustration among the person with disability and social scientists argue that this may result in withdrawal, introversion, aggressiveness etc.
Kurt Lewin, a German psychologist pointed out that behaviour is function of a person plus his or her environment.
An individual is part and product of his or social environment and so is a person with disability.
It therefore implies that the disabled are unabled by the negative attitude they experience in school and the society at large.
Supply of information
Much of the information shared in school and society is through verbal and written forms of communication.
There are no special information packages and accessible formats targeting people with disabilities such as Braille in some schools.
The implication is that those living with blindness cannot access written information as much as those who are deaf and dumb find it hard to access verbal information.
Moreover, because of the lack of physical access, the lack of disability-related knowledge makes schools unfriendly places for some learners.
Schools should strive to transform the curriculum in order to ensure that learners living with disabilities are informed.
At the end the condition in which they are plunged into by society disables them creating a false ideology about their condition.
In the end, society presents itself on national television and newspapers donating to people with disabilities as good ambassadors yet donations on their own are more crippling than the condition those with disabilities live.
Decision making
Learners living with disabilities can make their own decisions but often denied the opportunity.
Deciding for them is a negative attitude towards empowering the learners.
Allowing learners with disabilities to participate in decision making on factors that affect their learning is a powerful method for meeting their esteem needs.
Decisions on which resources best works for them must be decided by themselves.
Promoting decision making calls for active engagement between the school and the parents.
Communities should be encouraged to include people with disabilities in decisions that affect them not just as beneficiaries, but as agents of change because disability in another form of ability.
Skills development
Persons with disabilities continue to be the poorest of the poor mainly due to the lack of skills among other factors.
Unlike every other learner, learners with disabilities may not benefit from following the curriculum that is offered to everyone else.
Instead schools should provide a specialised curriculum that responds and addresses the unique abilities they possess.
This means that intellectual skills as well as practical skills are suited to any learner depending on the nature and degree of disability.
Schools can work with different groups and organisations that support learners with disabilities.
There is need for development partners and communities to continue fighting against the discrimination and barriers that prevent people with disabilities from fully participating in public life.
In our next publication of The Manica Post we will continue with addressing inclusion by focusing on infrastructure development in schools as a disabling phenomenon.
