Disabled inclusion as a humanising and healing praxis in higher education transformation

Abstract

Disabled students have a right to access higher education. Yet, only about one-fifth of youth with disability in South Africa attend and complete tertiary education. The low uptake and throughput are attributed to systemic and structural barriers. The University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Vision 2030 is to ‘unleash human potential to create a fair and just society through three pillars of excellence, transformation and sustainability’. To operationalise this vision, the current needs of disabled students have to be seen holistically. This article shares the experiences of inclusion and participation at UCT from the perspectives of disabled students. An exploratory case study research design, informed by an emancipatory disability research paradigm, was used to gain a contextually layered understanding of participants with disability perspectives on campus life. Purposive sampling was used to select 10 participants enrolled in undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in the Faculties of Commerce, Humanities, and Health Sciences.
Data were gathered using four focus group discussions of 90 min duration each and thematically analysed. Humanising Praxis was used as a transformative framework to interpret the findings. ‘Fostering inclusion’ was one theme that revealed shifts in mindsets about disability to remove barriers to participation experienced by disabled students.
Contribution: To cultivate an attitude of belonging, students’ personal agency must be harnessed, and academics must engage more in disability-inclusive practices that create support systems for both academic and social inclusion.