Judith McKenzie

Judith McKenzie (PhD) has worked in the disability field since 1980, when she graduated from the University of Cape Town with a degree in speech and hearing therapy. In 1988 she was employed at a rural hospital in South Africa, Tintswalo Hospital, where she participated in community based and interdisciplinary efforts to address disability, exclusion and poverty. In 1995 she was selected as a fellow on the Kellogg International Leadership Programme, and she benefited from international experience on inclusive education. In December 2009 she was awarded the UNESCO/Emir Jaber al-Ahmad al-Jaber al-Sabah Prize for promoting quality education for persons with intellectual disability. In the Division of Disability studies, she convenes the course, Disability Studies in Education and teaches Developing Critical research Literacy on the postgraduate diploma in Disability Studies at UCT. She convenes the MPhil and PhD programmes in Disability Studies. Judith has supervised or co-supervised nine master’s graduates to completion and graduated five doctoral candidates. She was the principal investigator responsible for the Teacher Empowerment for Disability Inclusion (TEDI) project and currently director of the Including Disability in Education in Africa (IDEA) research unit. She has worked in the field of inclusive education for over 20 years at all levels of the education system and published on the topic. She is the mother of a young man with Down Syndrome and has an intense interest and engagement with issues surrounding intellectual disability on both personal and professional levels. Research areas Inclusive education, particularly as regards policy development and teacher education Intellectual and developmental disability across the lifespan Digital education with a focus on Universal Design for Learning (UDL).

Publications

Redesigning Blended Courses Using the Universal Design for Learning Framework: A Case of Disability Studies in an Education Short Course at the University of Cape Town
Redesigning Blended Courses Using the Universal Design for Learning Framework: A Case of Disability Studies in an Education Short Course at the University of Cape Town
Kofi Nseibo, Chantal Samuels, Judith McKenzie, Janet Small, Amani Karisa, Lauren Butler, Kristin van Tonder. © 2023. 19 pages.
In striving to make education more inclusive to all students, partly because of the student protests and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on teaching and learning, the...