Is disability inclusion in educational spaces an essential or an additional element? Premium

Is disability inclusion in educational spaces an essential or an additional element?

Fifteen years ago, Nilima (name changed) and her husband, both with 90% visual impairment, sold candies at a suburban station in Chennai to sustain their family and to save money to travel to her university in a neighbouring city, and collect her B.A. Tamil degree certificates. Nilima’s aspiration was to pursue a Master’s degree. Through philanthropic intervention, she realised this dream and even secured employment as a Tamil teacher at the primary level in an established private global school.

Nilima’s determination earned public recognition and awards, crystallising a powerful narrative that resilience holds potential for social approval and appreciation. Yet, does this narrative, the school’s charitable action, and public recognition constitute sufficient systemic efforts toward disability inclusion?

But, by early this year, the school terminated her employment, citing her disability as incompatible with technological advancement of smart classrooms. Nilima’s situation reveals intersectional discrimination: gender, class, disability, technology, talent and the neo-liberal logic of economic return all converge to produce a precarity, which was further masked by the glorification of her resilience. The philanthropic intervention collapsed, as it addressed only her symptoms: providing educational access, employment, and income. More pointedly, what prevented a well-resourced school from embedding disability inclusion into its technological advancements?

This brings up the perennial question: Is disability inclusion in educational spaces merely an add-on? This necessitates a return to understanding what disability inclusion encompasses across visible and invisible disabilities.

Disability inclusion requires an interrelated understanding across levels of policy/practice and theoretical frameworks so that it can move beyond symptomatic redressal. In Justice and Equality in Higher Education, Lorella Terzi notes that disability inclusion developed fundamentally in opposition to the idea of special education itself. The opposition shows a historical progression from segregationist approaches that isolated students with disabilities in separate institutions to integrationist approaches that placed them in mainstream classrooms to contemporary inclusive education policies that aspire to make inclusion inherent to education itself rather than mere policy compliance. Terzi theorises this progression through Amartya Sen’s capability approach, which places human heterogeneity central to justice and equality.

Shashikala Srinivasan, in Liberal Education and its Discontents, acknowledges liberal education’s contribution to Bildung, the German concept emphasising the cultivation of the whole self through education. Contemporary liberal arts institutions in India have operationalised this vision through interdisciplinary curricula and residential models, exemplifying inclusion in their curricular and pedagogical design. Saikat Majumdar, in College: Pathways of Possibility, uses Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligence theory to envision a model of liberal arts beyond the conventional cognitive-intellectual domain to include linguistic, musical, spatial and other forms of intelligence.