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Disability Week Talk

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During disability week Desire Chiwandire presented a paper on funding mechanisms and students with disabilities. This is part of a project which will also see Chiwandire showcasing his work at the 10th Annual Conference on Teaching and Learning Higher Education, 20-22 September in Durban and at the 7th Disability Networking Zone at the International AIDS Conference which is being held from the 18th to the 22nd of July in England.

Chiwandire is a PhD candidate in Professor Louise Vincent’s Higher Education Institutional Culture, Equity and Transformation (HEICET) research group. Post 1994 South Africa enacted a number of policies which aimed to promote access and inclusion for those historically excluded from participation in higher education.  The National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) was established in 1996 to fund needy but capable students to pursue tertiary education (Carrim and Wangenge-Ouma, 2012) which led  to what some have called a ‘revolution’ in the increase in the proportion of black students in higher education (Cooper and Subotzky, 2001; see also Pityana, 2006). In practice, however, challenges with “student dropout, low throughput, and low graduation rates” (Cele and Meno, 2006:38) remain – what some have called the ‘revolving door syndrome’.

This led to an understanding that access was not enough without promoting success and flourishing. It led also to questions being asked about even those who do manage to obtain their degrees but leave university to face uncertain futures and unemployment. As Wilson-Strydom has argued, what we are effectively doing is promoting new forms of social exclusion (Wilson-Strydom, 2011:407).

One set of responses focused on academic support programmes and the strengthening of teaching and learning across the higher education system as the key to improving success rates. Other responses focused on financial pressure as a determinant of early exit from university and sought to raise funds for loans and bursaries. A further set of responses focused on institutional cultures and the, often hidden, subterranean ways in which these perpetuate exclusion and marginalization.

This context provides the backdrop to the HEICET focus on access and success for students with disabilities. In 2015, Minister Nzimande reiterated, that the DHET “was committed to expanding access and success in institutions of higher learning for students who have special needs” (SA News, 2015a). In Rethinking Transformation and Its Knowledge(s): The Case of South African Higher Education, Lis Lange has argued that:

transformation has been reduced to the numbers, percentages and ratios of black and white people and, to a lesser extent, men and women involved in or accepted into institutions, professions, positions, education, etc. Very few, if any, other variables like class, sexual orientation, and disability made it into the statistical cut, and the overall orientation of institutions and policies tends to fall under the radar of a more nuanced sense of transformation (Lange, 2014:4).

Ainscow, Booth and Dyson have regard that inclusive education is not only as a basic human right, but is the foundation for a more just society (Ainscow et al, 2004; see also Ainscow, 2006; Mittler, 2000).

Disability in the context of education can be defined as any difficulty in learning or lack of access to learning due to physical, sensory, medical -- including both physical and/or intellectual conditions -- which requires additional support for a person to be able to succeed educationally.

Chiwandire has focused on this question of “additional support” and what institutions are doing to provide this support to ensure that students with disabilities can participate in university life as fully as their non-disabled peers. He argues that rather than ‘disability’ being a characteristic of a person, it is a condition of a society that fails to accommodate those whom it regards as marginal while setting up the non-disabled person as the  ‘norm’.  Thus for Chiwandire the solution to creating more accommodating campus environments lies  in part with able bodied people to change their negative attitudes towards people with disability.

Rather than being merely a condition of the physical body, disability comes about through an interaction with society and the way in which dominant norms and practices exclude and discriminate against people with disabilities.

Chiwandire and Vincent are at present working on a book project which will document various aspects of the experiences of students with disabilities.  The book will be an edited volume with contributions from critical disability scholars across South Africa.