Inclusive and Supportive Education Congress
International
Special Education Conference
Inclusion: Celebrating Diversity?
1st - 4th August 2005. Glasgow, Scotland
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Inclusive and Supportive Education Congress 1st - 4th August 2005. Glasgow, Scotland |
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Dr Claudine Storbeck
Deaf Education: Specialised Education
University of the Witwatersrand
Private Bag 3
Wits, 2050
South Africa
claudine.storbeck@gmail.com
Introduction
The South African education system has in recent years undergone a transformation, from an exclusionary, internally disparate system to one of inclusivity, equality and access for all. This educational reform has mirrored the overall transformation of South Africa and her people. Presently South Africa has one of the most progressive constitutions in the world, one of only two that recognises the need to develop Sign Language as a language, laying the basis for the recognition of South African Sign Language as the first language of choice for Deaf learners. At a policy level, thus, it is evident that South Africa is among the leaders in recognising the needs of Deaf learners, however in practice and implementation the situation is not what it appears. In addition to equal access and equal opportunities (which is the thrust of the South African inclusive movement) the human rights approach calls for equal outcomes, which is a far greater challenge.
This paper provides a brief overview of the current transformation process in the South African education system, with a critical reflection on the theory and practice of inclusion. Throughout the discussion Deaf education is foregrounded, with particular reference to the misconceptions regarding the implementation of inclusion. The paper has a twofold aim: firstly crucial questions are raised regarding the South African Deaf community’s rejection of inclusion and it is argued that this rejection is based on a false premise; and secondly it aims to interrogate theory and practice within Deaf Education in order to enhance the debate, which can add to the development of a new discourse and an improved pedagogy.
South Africa has a long history of oppression, discrimination and lack of equality. These inequalities, found in all spheres of life became particularly evident in education. In an attempt to overcome the legacy of apartheid, the South African education community initiated a process of transformation. This process has been centrally driven by the philosophy of inclusion, where each decision and action is guided by the core inclusive educational principle: equal education and access for all learners.
This long practice of discrimination based on racial categories soon extended to cultural and linguistic discrimination as well. This discrimination became most evident within the apartheid education system, which ensured that ample resources, funding and quality education were made available primarily to the white minority. This race related discrimination and segregation of learners subsequently “extended to incorporate segregation on the basis of disability” (National Department of Education, 2000: 4).
In 1996 however South Africa adopted a groundbreaking constitution which legally entrenched the basic human rights of all people. The constitution legislated that all people are equal and thus have equal rights, including the fundamental right to basic education prohibiting discriminating “against anyone on one or more grounds, including race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, language and birth” (National Government of South Africa, 9:3).
In this transformation process away from the legacy of apartheid and apartheid education, South Africa has embraced inclusivity, which is in essence about overcoming the past and present inequalities and barriers to access and participation. To this end, South Africa has embraced inclusive education as the vehicle of change.
The history of Deaf education in South Africa is closely linked to the legacy of apartheid and more specifically apartheid education policies. These policies influenced the development of separate schools for the Deaf: Black Deaf schools, White Deaf schools and Coloured/ Indian Deaf Schools (Morgans, 2001). Currently the 43 schools for the Deaf and hard-of-hearing in South Africa, are still primarily racially and culturally defined. In a similar way the majority of teachers of the Deaf have chosen to teach in schools which fit their particular racial or cultural profile.
In addition to physical and geographical segregation, apartheid also had an influence on the mode of communication and thus on the mode of education in schools for the Deaf. Whereas white schools for the Deaf were run as elitist oral schools, Black schools were allowed to use what was thought, at the time, to be the less desirable ‘manual’ method. Ironically this led to the rich and well developed Black dialects of South African Sign Language (Morgans, 2001).
Related to this difference in pedagogical method, a second major area of differentiation has been evident in the level of education provided to Deaf learners. White learners have historically received an ‘academic’ education, whereas Black learners have received a more vocational and practical education. Regardless of method or content however, education levels at schools for the Deaf – all races and cultures - remain problematic, with the majority of Deaf learners leaving school functionally illiterate and thus largely unemployable. One of the central contributing factors has been that teachers of the Deaf have not been required to receive specialised training to teach Deaf learners, nor have they been required to have Sign Language skills or any knowledge of Deaf culture before entering schools for the Deaf.
Despite the clearly inadequate education system for Deaf learners the process of transformation toward an inclusive education system, and thus equitable education for a`ll, has not been readily embraced by the Deaf education community. The following section will briefly consider this transformation process in the South African education system in order to gain a deeper understanding of the debate that surrounds its implementation of inclusion within Deaf Education.
The South African education system has in the past been a powerful tool for perpetuating the aims of apartheid, where many students experienced discrimination based on race and ethnicity. This “ institutionalisation of apartheid in every facet of South African life had a significant impact on the area of ‘special needs’ and support in education, entrenching racial disparities and contributing to the massive inequalities in their educational provision” (National Department of Education, 1997: 22).
During an investigation into this discriminatory education system, the National Education Policy Initiative (NEPI) exposed the role of curriculum, in addition to the human factor, for stressing difference, and thus promoting prejudice in education in terms of race, gender and social class (NEPI, 1993). This confirmed that the South African education system was preventing the development of a common South African citizenry.
In an attempt to overcome this discrimination and in following international trends to address the diverse needs of all learners minimising barriers to learning, South Africa established two special task teams in 1996. These task teams (NCSNET and NCESS) were given the responsibility of investigating the state of special needs education in South Africa and making recommendations to the National Department of Education on how equality could be ensured in all sectors of education and training. After a year of intensive research and public hearings in all nine provinces, the task teams agreed that discrimination was indeed occurring in schools and that this was being perpetuated by the following key barriers to learning:
In identifying these key barriers to learning, the task teams were able to characterise current practice and make practical recommendations to improve the situation, hence contributing to the development of an inclusive education system which “promotes education for all” where all learners “participate actively in the education process … as equal members of society” (National Department of Education, 1997:53).
These recommendations were further entrenched specifically for people with disabilities and learners with special education needs in “The White Paper on an Integrated Disability Strategy” (National Government of South Africa, 1997) and more recently in the draft “ White Paper: Building an Inclusive Education and Training System” (National Department of Education, 2000).
Both these documents decry the segregation of people with disabilities and make specific practical educational recommendations regarding the transformation of the education system at the institutional, instructional and curriculum levels. To this end t he following principles were identified as central in the transformation process: redress, equity, human rights and social justice, equal access and community responsiveness.
Despite being at the very core of our constitution, the development of an inclusive education system has been quite contentious especially within the South African disability sector. In the following section we will look briefly at what inclusive education is intended to be and then examine misconceptions about inclusion within the current Deaf Education context.
Inclusion, the antithesis of segregated education in South Africa, has come to mean equal access to a non-discriminatory education system for disabled learners and learners with special education needs. Despite this narrow focus within the South African context, the philosophy of inclusion is far broader than merely special needs education, as it encompasses equality and basic human rights for all learners.
Inclusion as a philosophy requires a change in attitude in the whole community from a discourse of difference and disability to a discourse of rights and equal opportunity (Naiker, 1999:14). Such a transformed discourse would mean commitment to creating equal opportunities for learners through challenging the system to continually change and adapt, rather than focussing on the inadequacies and differences within the individual learners. This has required a “paradigm shift from a focus on ‘learners with special needs’ to identifying and addressing barriers to learning and participation” (Muthukrishna, 2000: 67).
In order to adequately meet the educational needs of learners and their particular barriers to learning, the White Paper differentiated barriers to learning operative within the learner or the education and training system, from barriers experienced during the learning process (National Department of Education, 2000:9).
To this end inclusion in South Africa has been formalised as:
The implementation of inclusion has been crystalised as broader than formal schooling, acknowledging learning in both formal and informal contexts and manners and in broader societal settings in order to maximise the participation of all learners. To this end, attitudes, behaviours, methodologies, curricula and environments need to be changed to meet the needs of all learners.
Despite this fundamental evidence that inclusion in South Africa is a philosophy of anti-discrimination throughout the broad spectrum of needs that learners exhibit, the majority of South African educationists are distracted by their myopic view of inclusion as synonymous with mainstreaming, specifically for learners with disabilities.
This misconception has filtered into the Deaf education sector, where the majority of practitioners have misunderstood inclusion to mean the unequivocal abolishment of schools for the Deaf and the subsequent mainstreaming of all deaf learners, or even worse, reverse inclusion where multiple disabled learners are ‘included’ into regular schools for the Deaf.
The concern about abolishing specialised schools for the Deaf has led to demonstrations and lobbying at various fora against the implementation of inclusion for Deaf learners. Despite valid arguments that have arisen as a consequence (see UNESCO consultation report 1999 for one such example) it is asserted that these misinterpretations of inclusion are based on a false assumption. To this end, much time has been wasted fighting inclusion, meanwhile neglecting the essential process of understanding the implications and requirements for the implementation of what is intended as inclusion.
A further irony of this struggle against inclusion in favour of the status quo lies in the fact that currently schools for the Deaf produce learners who are to a large extent functionally illiterate and thus largely unemployable (DEAFSA, 1997).
In considering the philosophy and the appropriate practice of inclusion and the subsequent endeavour to create barrier-free learning for all learners, which is deeply entrenched in central documents such as the Constitution, the South African Schools Act and the Language in Education Policy (National Government of South Africa, 1996a, 1996b and 1996c), inclusion as it was intended may yet be the key to ensuring equal education (and thus literacy) for all Deaf learners.
Despite the drive to maintain schools for the Deaf in South Africa, ironically at present, the majority of Deaf learners do not gain access to knowledge at school through their first language. Furthermore, teachers of the Deaf in South Africa are not required to be trained as teachers of the Deaf, and therefore have little or no knowledge of the pedagogical implications of teaching literacy among other things in an auditory-oral language through a visual-gestural language with no conventional orthography. In practice, the majority of schools for the Deaf in South Africa have been excluding Deaf learners from truly equal opportunities and thus equal education.
In line with international trends toward bilingual education, and in agreement with current policies such as the South African Schools Act and Language in Education Policy in this paper I would like to propose that we embrace barrier-free education for Deaf learners, and thus embrace the philosophy of inclusion.
Claiming the philosophy of inclusive education, and the subsequent implementation strategies and tools, Deaf Education thus has the right to look forward to barrier-free learning environments, which will include barrier-free communication, accessible curricula, and thus fully accessible learning experiences. This in turn will require that teachers of the Deaf are sufficiently equipped to create these barrier-free learning experiences to which each Deaf learner has a right.
In practice one avenue of inclusion can therefore be translated into Schools for the Deaf being renamed Sign Language medium schools rather than as specialised schools. To this end inclusion accommodates Sign Language as medium of instruction for Deaf learners and exposure to the Deaf Community and their culture. Additionally the inclusive philosophy endeavours to ‘include’ all learners into the mainstream community, thus exposing Deaf learners to the hearing community, their language, and their culture.
From the above discussion the irony of the argument thus becomes apparent: in the search for a truly accessible, barrier-free learning environment for Deaf learners (which at present is being labelled Bilingual Education for the Deaf), we find the fruition of inclusive education.
ANC Education Department, 1994. A Policy Framework for Education and Training. Discussion document, Johannesburg.
Deaf Federation of South Africa. (1997). Higher Education and the needs of the Deaf Community - Discussions with the University of South Africa (UNISA). Johannesburg: DEAFSA.
Engelbrecht, P. 1999. A Theoretical framework for inclusive education. In. Engelbrecht, P, Green, L, Naiker, N & Engelbrecht, L (eds). Inclusive Education in Action. Pretoria: J.L van Schaik.
Morgans, H. 2001. South African Sign Language and European Influences. Paper presented at the International Conference on European languages. Johannesburg
Muthikrishna, N. 2000. Transforming professional development programmes into an inclusive education system. In. Savolainen, H, Kokkala, H & Alasuutari, H (eds). Meeting Special and Divers Educational Needs: Making inlusive education a reality. Helsinki: Niilo Maki Institute.
Muthukrishna, A & Ram, A, 2000. A Teacher Education Programme for Deaf
Students in South Africa: A Focus on the development of process, policy, and practice at SACOL. Paper presented at the Southern African Conference for the formulation of tertiary education policy and practice for people with disabilities, Johannesburg, South Africa – October 2000.
Naiker, G. 1999. Inclusive Education in South Africa. In Engelbrecht, P, Green, L, Naiker, N & Engelbrecht, L (eds). Inclusive Education in Action. Pretoria: J.L van Schaik.
National Department of Education, 1997. Quality Education for All: Overcoming barriers to learning and development, November 1997. Parow: Caxton Printers.
National Department of Education, 2000. Education White Paper 5: Building an Inclusive Education and Training System, March 2000. Draft.
National Education Policy Investigation (NEPI), 1993. The Framework Report and Final Report Summaries, Oxford University Press/ NECC: Johannesburg.
National Government of South Africa, 1996a. The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa. Pretoria: Government Printer.
National Government of South Africa, 1996b. South African Schools Act. Pretoria: Government Printer.
National Government of South Africa, 1996c. National Education Policy Act. Pretoria: Government Printer.
National Government of South Africa, 1997. White Paper on an Integrated National Disability Strategy, November 1997. Ndaleni, Western Cape: Rustica Press (Pty) Ltd
World Conference on Special Needs Education. The Salamanca Statement and Framework for Actions on Special Needs Education. UNESCO and Ministry of Education and Science, Spain. June 1994.
UNESCO, 1999. Inclusive education and the Deaf Child in South Africa. UNESCO Consultation Report. Pretoria: UNESCO.
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