Inclusive education is pivotal to sustainable development in different parts of the world. This perhaps accounts for its inclusion in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in SDG4, which targets inclusive education. Meanwhile, inclusive education has predominantly dimensioned physically challenged or impaired learners. However, with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and the sudden transition to online teaching and learning, the quest for a different dimension of inclusive education, especially with regard to technology, is on the increase. This study investigates how inclusive education is presented in scholarly published articles in the South African context. Five phases of a scoping review, namely identification, finding/searching, choosing, extraction/charting and collation, were adapted for the study. From the search using the terms “inclusive” AND “distance” AND “education” AND “disability” AND “South Africa”, a corpus of 73 scholarly published articles were identified. Using different selection criteria such as specific context of the study, 55 articles were deleted. Thus, a final corpus of 18 articles were analysed. From the reviewed relevant literature, themes were generated after retrieved information had been coded and categorised. The study indicated that the focus on inclusive education in the South African context is directed towards physically impaired or challenged persons. The study recommends that in the context of distance education and with the sudden transition to online teaching and learning, lack of access to technology such as computers and Wi-Fi, among others, can constitute technological disability. Thus, inclusive education in the dimension of technological disability is to be explored.

Author: Chinaza Uleanya

Published in: Canada International Conference on Education, 2023

• Date of Conference: 26-28 June, 2023
• DOI: 10.20533/CICE.2023.0044
• Electronic ISBN: 978-1-913572-58-7
• Conference Location: Residence and Conference Centre, Toronto, Canada