Mainstream primary school teachers’ perceptions about the implementation of inclusive education

Abstract

Inclusive education (IE) was conceived in the Global North and is deeply rooted in the Western epistemological disciplinary traditions. IE was developed in the ‘resource-rich’ Global North and eventually imposed on the ‘resource- poor’ countries of the Global South. Its evangelical, civilizational and modernist unilinear journey from the Euro-North American epistemological archive and the colonial library constitute coloniality, that manifests itself in the form of coloniality of knowledge, of being, and that of power. South Africa, a Third World /Global South country introduced the policy relatively very late just like other countries of the Third World. Its implementation is still a hard nut to crack, largely because of its origins, development, and configuration. The dissertation reviews the current demands for IE globally and how this has been implemented in South Africa; and more particularly in resource-poor schools on the Cape Flats in the Western Cape province of South Africa. Using a qualitative approach with interviews with 10 purposively selected participants( five males; five females), observations and policy analysis as tools for the research, the researcher concludes that IE as currently espoused has been a failure, particularly because of the skewed funding model use to fund education, and that an African approach is needed to ensure that it works in poorly-resourced South African schools. The researcher recommends that the philosophy of IE needs to be completely overhauled and redeveloped from a Global-South perspective, free of colonialism and coloniality.