This book represents an original and innovative series of insights, ideas and questions concerning inclusive education and cross-cultural understandings. Drawing on historical and cultural material, policy developments, legislation and research findings, the book provides a critical exploration of key factors including inclusive education, human rights, change, diversity and special educational needs. The contributors focus closely on how these factors are defined and experienced within particular societies.

This work contributes to teachers’ and academic researchers’ understanding of the varied and complex ways inclusion and exclusion can be understood. It provides a lucid, coherent analysis into the nature of categorization, labeling and discursive practices within official discourse and procedures as well as the positional relationships between space, place and identities in relation to the experience of marginalized people including disabled pupils and young people.

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How do we articulate the possibilities, limitations and challenges of inclusive schooling and education in African contexts? This book insists that inclusive education cannot be taken for granted. Inclusion is neither a natural nor a given educational practice. It must be struggled for. Bringing a critical perspective to inclusive schooling and education is imperative. This book adds to current educational debates with an African lens. It engages inclusive education from multiple lenses of curriculum content, classroom pedagogy and instruction, representation, culture, environment and the socio-organization life of schools, the pursuit of equity and social justice and the search for educational relevance. It is opined that Africa cannot be left behind in rethinking educational inclusion in ways that evoke critical questions of power, equity and social difference. The question of leaner’s identity in terms of class, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability, language, ethnicity and race are equally consequential for African schooling and education. When inclusion is understood as wholeness of education, then how schooling and education engage the complete learner – her/his body, mind, soul and spirit, as well as the use of local community and Indigenous knowledges in teaching and learning become relevant. Inclusion stands the risk of liberal educational agendas that simply tinker or toy with schooling and education and hardly embrace the challenge of educational change. What we need is a fundamental structural change that ensures schooling and education embraces difference while grappling with the teaching of Indigeneity, decolonization and resistance.

This book addresses the tensions of existing theories and practices of inclusive education from an international perspective. Adopting Disability Critical Race Theory in Education (DisCrit) and Critical Disability Studies (CDS), the authors expose how race neutral knowledge characterizes inclusive education and exhorts readers to consider how intersectional perspectives provide more complex and nuanced understandings about ways in which racism and ableism simultaneously circulate as intersecting oppressions in schools and societies and across geographical borders. The authors begin by engaging in a critical analysis of the genesis of inclusive education before exploring how existing policies and practices of inclusive education in the global North evade the collusive nature of oppressions faced by minoritized students with disabilities and are uncritically transferred into the global South. Ultimately, the book encourages readers to reconceptualize inclusive education and move towards developing and sustaining transformative notions of global justice.

This book reviews literature and research linked to early childhood education and care (ECEC). This educational level is fundamental for acquiring key competencies for school entry and establishing the physical, cognitive, and emotional bases for lifelong learning. Preschool education should promote student autonomy as the ability of a child to act on their own free will because it is a critical part of learning for all children. When a child has autonomy, it helps build confidence for responding to the demands of the family, self-esteem values linked to collaboration tasks, and independence in selecting reasonable choices.

In recent years, international efforts to improve educational quality in sub-Saharan Africa have focused on promoting learner-centered pedagogy. However, it has not fl ourished for cultural, economic, and political reasons that often go unrecognized by development organizations and policymakers. This edited volume draws on a long-term collaboration between African and American educational researchers in addressing critical questions regarding how teachers in one African country—Tanzania—conceptualize learner-centered pedagogy and struggle to implement it under challenging material conditions. One chapter considers how international support for learner-centered pedagogy has infl uenced national policies. Subsequent chapters utilize qualitative data from classroom observations, interviews, and focus group discussions across six Tanzanian secondary schools to examine how such policies shape local practices of professional development, inclusion, gender, and classroom discourse. In addition, the volume presents an analysis of the benefi ts and challenges of international research between Tanzanian and U.S. scholars, illuminating the complexity of collaboration as it simultaneously presents the outcome of joint research on teachers’ beliefs and practices. The chapters conclude with questions for discussion that can be used in courses on international development, social policy, and teacher education. “This volume, written by a multi-national team of scholar-practitioners, makes an important contribution to our understanding of learner-centered teaching and collaborative educational research. Based on an intensive investigation in Tanzania of a professional development program and teachers’ efforts to conceptualize and implement a globally-promoted pedagogical approach, the authors illustrate – and critically analyze – how these practices are enabled and constrained by cultural lenses, power relations, and material conditions. Importantly, they also examine refl exively how cultural, power, and resource issues shaped their struggle to engage in a collective praxis of qualitative inquiry. The tensions referenced in the title sparked valuable insights, which will be useful to educators, researchers, and policy makers.” — Mark Ginsburg, FHI 360 and Teachers College, Columbia University.