Disability Rights Awareness Month (DRAM) 2024, observed from 3 November to 3 December, marks an important period of reflection and action. This year’s theme, “Celebrating 30 Years of Democracy: Creating a Disability-Inclusive Society for a Better Quality of Life and Protection of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities”, highlights the progress made over three decades and the work that still needs to be done to build an inclusive society. This period calls on us to assess how far we have come in embedding inclusivity into all aspects of society, particularly regarding basic education. Mr Jabulani Ngcobo, Director for Inclusive Education offered insights into DRAM.

Inclusion is about how we view, understand and treat persons with disabilities. Thus, inclusive education should go beyond policy changes and actively reshape our mindsets, encouraging us to view disability not as a deficit to be fixed, but as a natural aspect of human diversity that requires thoughtful accommodation and understanding. This means that inclusive education must not just be about changing policies; it must enable us to question our entrenched beliefs about how we think about and understand disability. It must help us challenge our perceptions of disability as a problem and understand that learners have diverse learning needs that must be accommodated in our teaching. It must enable us to challenge our deficit ways of understanding diversity – which lures us into thinking about and treating disability as a “problem or abnormality” that must be diagnosed, fixed, cured or eliminated. It must help us not only focus on deficits and limitations but also on the social, environmental, and systemic factors that may be contributing to the challenges people with disabilities are facing and experiencing.

For example, within a schooling context, an autistic learner may be seen only through their disability, leading teachers to believe that the learner is sick and needs to be “treated” or “fixed” to become “normal” before they can be taught. This means that they may believe that the learner is incapable of learning as long as their disability has not been fixed. In this regard, they may find it difficult to establish supportive learning environments to nurture the learner's unique strengths and potential. In this regard, viewing disability as a problem that needs to be fixed, rather than as part of human diversity, will reinforce the teachers’ focus on the learner’s deficiencies, leading to their exclusion from teaching and learning activities. To address this, it is essential to empower teachers to redefine the meaning of “normal” in their classrooms to refer to the diverse ways of being, rather than some one-size-fits-all standard or expectation.

One way to empower teachers to redefine “normal” is through self-reflexive professional development programmes that can help them become more aware of their identities and how they create narratives about learners with disabilities. For example, training workshops can equip teachers to notice patterns in their experiences, to question their attitudes, values, assumptions and habitual actions, and to help them understand their complex roles concerning persons or learners with disabilities. This approach will encourage teachers to notice how their assumptions, thoughts, values, beliefs and actions assist the structures and processes that marginalise and exclude persons and learners with disabilities. That is, it will help them understand what and how much they need to change in themselves to ensure that persons and learners with disabilities feel welcome around them and in their classrooms. It will help them to ask: Why did I miss this? Where was my attention directed at when I missed it? What are the things that allowed me to lose attention and make that error?

The perception of disability as a problem that must be fixed often influences how teachers view and interact with learners with disabilities. When disability is seen purely as a deficiency or something that needs to be cured, it can lead to lowered expectations and missed opportunities for learners. This mindset not only harms learners’ potential but also undermines the core principles of inclusive education, which aims to recognise and celebrate diversity in all its forms. Thus, in line with the spirit of Disability Rights Awareness Month, true democracy in basic education, therefore, means constantly questioning entrenched beliefs about disability to protect and uphold the rights of every learner, encouraging a society where the quality of life for persons with disabilities is genuinely enhanced through equitable access and representation.