Students With Disabilities' Learning in South African Higher Education: Disabling Normatives and Disablement

Introduction

Despite countries in the South making efforts to include all persons after the so-called end of colonisation, the dominant strata of society continue to construct a disabling normative; in the process, diversity is not fully addressed. This is happening despite South Africa ratifying the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD, 2006), an international legal instrument that seeks to ensure the equal rights and participation of persons with disabilities in inclusive education. However, specific criteria for ability-disability and normal-abnormal dichotomies and sets of boundaries are used (Shildrick, 2009). As a result, the construction, deconstruction and reconstruction of disability have continued in society, causing a reproduction of disabling normatives and consequent disablement of persons with disabilities in different shapes and sizes in many spaces, including such students in higher education contexts. Disabling normatives and disablement continue to have serious negative implications for students with disabilities’ learning and success, specifically in higher education in South Africa largely, and at the specific institution under study.

In contemporary debates, many contestations border around disabling normatives and disablement creating disability (Oliver 1990; 1996a; 1996b). When engaging in such debates, it can be argued that if there is ability, there is also disability. Thus, if one perspective is for the ‘normal’, the other should be for the ‘abnormal’. Two major questions should be answered: Firstly, who makes the constructions and categories? And secondly, how are students with disabilities experiencing disablement in their learning through the socially constructed disabling normative at the institution? Answering these questions might unveil why disabling normatives and disablement of students with disabilities continue to be reproduced despite all efforts towards inclusion in South African higher education specifically, and in Africa, broadly. It is against this background that the issue of normativity and disablement emerges in this chapter, to inform what might not be seen at surface levels in terms of students with disabilities’ continued exclusion from South African contexts of higher education.

Significant research has been conducted on the continued exclusion of students with disabilities in higher education (Howell, 2006; Mutanga, 2017; Ndlovu, 2017). However, little has been written from the perspectives of normativity and disablement, being one of the underlying factors in exclusion. This chapter presents this angle as a different way of understanding the hidden underlying factors resulting in the students with disabilities’ exclusion in learning in South African higher education. Examples of how limitations are encountered in disabling normativity, resulting in disablement, are drawn from students with disabilities’ lived experiences. The findings are extracted from an empirical study that was conducted on their entry into specific programmes, their learning and throughput. Feedback from the disability unit staff are also cited because they form an important component in terms of understanding disabling normativity and disablement of students with disabilities at the specific institution of higher education under study.

The chapter starts by discussing the concepts of disabling normativity and disablement, and the context in which they are used in this chapter. Specific disabling normative practices of education, physical and social structures and how they ‘disable’ students with disabilities from accessing higher education, learning and completing their programmes, are presented. The chapter then discusses how Ubuntu, as an African philosophy, can be an alternative for normativity and how it can enable, rather than disable, students with disabilities’ general functioning in higher education broadly, and in learning within the specific context of South African higher education.