Inclusive Education in the global South? A Colombian perspective: ‘When you look towards the past, you see children with disabilities, and if you look towards the future, what you see is diverse learners.’

TY - JOUR

T1 - Inclusive Education in the global South? A Colombian perspective:

T2 - ‘When you look towards the past, you see children with disabilities, and if you look towards the future, what you see is diverse learners.’

AU - Kamenopoulou, Lida

PY - 2018/2/10

Y1 - 2018/2/10

N2 - The findings of the research presented in this paper come in the aftermath of a momentous year for Colombia, a year that saw a historic peace deal signed between the government and the biggest left-wing guerrilla group (FARC) with the aim of bringing an over 50 year civil war to a long awaited conclusion. At a time when the Colombian people are being required to genuinely reflect on what inclusion means to them and how best they can achieve it within their deeply diverse society, I present findings from an ethnographic research that I conducted on inclusion in education focusing on the capital, Bogotá. The research foci were a) inclusive education in practice, b) teacher preparation for inclusive education, and c) local understanding of inclusive education. Findings include a local understanding of inclusive education as synonymous with disability, special teachers as synonymous with inclusive education in practice, and big gaps in teacher preparation for inclusive education. Based on these findings, I emphasise that inclusive education is a global North-created concept, which can acquire different meanings in global South contexts, and I argue that Colombia in particular needs time to make its own understanding of inclusive education a priority.© 2018 Leda Kamenopoulou. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 International License (CC-BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/.

AB - The findings of the research presented in this paper come in the aftermath of a momentous year for Colombia, a year that saw a historic peace deal signed between the government and the biggest left-wing guerrilla group (FARC) with the aim of bringing an over 50 year civil war to a long awaited conclusion. At a time when the Colombian people are being required to genuinely reflect on what inclusion means to them and how best they can achieve it within their deeply diverse society, I present findings from an ethnographic research that I conducted on inclusion in education focusing on the capital, Bogotá. The research foci were a) inclusive education in practice, b) teacher preparation for inclusive education, and c) local understanding of inclusive education. Findings include a local understanding of inclusive education as synonymous with disability, special teachers as synonymous with inclusive education in practice, and big gaps in teacher preparation for inclusive education. Based on these findings, I emphasise that inclusive education is a global North-created concept, which can acquire different meanings in global South contexts, and I argue that Colombia in particular needs time to make its own understanding of inclusive education a priority.© 2018 Leda Kamenopoulou. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 International License (CC-BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/.

KW - Inclusive Education; Disability; Sustainable Development Goals; Social Justice; Southern theory

M3 - Article

SN - 2050-7364

VL - 5

SP - 1192

EP - 1214

JO - Disability and the Global South

JF - Disability and the Global South

IS - 1

ER -