Making Education Inclusive

Exclusionary pressures and practices are pervasive in education, despite the clamour for more inclusive education. Even as classrooms worldwide become more diverse, education is unlikely to become inclusive without deliberate efforts to dismantle exclusion and enable inclusion. This book is a compilation of contributions to the conversation about what these efforts might entail. The conversation has its origins in the Making Education Inclusive Conference held in 2013, which brought together academics and practitioners from Southern Africa and other countries. Given the expectation that teachers should play a key role in promoting inclusion, it is not surprising to find significant interest in teacher education from many of the contributing authors. Their concerns range from explicit teacher development for pedagogical responsiveness to learner diversity, to overcoming the epistemological marginalisation that learners experience where teachers are not fully confident of their subject content and how to teach it. Access to education is clearly not enough, and other contributors to this book concern themselves with ways in which structures and systems could be reconstituted to enable meaningful inclusion. This might mean looking at how teachers might use tiered systems of behaviour support and various metacognitive strategies, how physical access can be promoted on a university campus, and understanding how parents think about disability. Each chapter represents a different perspective on what it might mean to resist educational exclusion in its many forms, and each offers possible ways to make education more inclusive.

Elizabeth Walton and Sharon Moonsamy are both Senior Lecturers at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Elizabeths field is inclusive education, and Sharons is speech and hearing therapy. They find common cause in their interest in promoting and enabling inclusive and supportive learning environments in the challenging contexts of South African education.