This chapter critically engages relevant literature on the trajectories of disability inclusion in Technical Vocational Education and Training Centres (TVET) education and training systems. It challenges dominant epistemologies in critical disability studies that have been traditionally fore-grounded, imagined, and constructed within Westernized philosophical paradigms. For centuries, it has been difficult to re-imagine alternative forms of knowledge of impairment, disability, and debility from the subaltern standpoint. The author seeks to highlight the uneven ways through which knowledge systems on Disability Inclusion in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) oscillates between the so-called problematic dichotomies of the global North and Global South. This is achieved by critically weighing in the contribution and impact of legislation, policies, and newer perspectives on the Scholarship of Learning (SoL) from the global North that influences critical pedagogies on disability inclusion in TVET colleges in the Southern African context.
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This chapter was extracted from my ongoing Ph.D. thesis, which focuses on the narratives of inclusion, exclusion, and disclusion of learners with physical and learning impairments studying at four TVET colleges in Johannesburg, South Africa. First and foremost, the study recognized that critical research on disability inclusion pedagogies and practices in TVET education and training system from the global South has largely been underrepresented. For example, there is a plethora of literature on scholarships of learning and inclusion in Higher Education Institutions in Southern Africa. (Form report 2010, Chataika 2004, Matshedisho 2006). However, the term ‘higher education institutions’ in the majority of these studies has been used to mean mainstream universities. An assessment of research policies and legislations on Southern African inclusive pedagogies in higher learning institutions will reveal that there are tensions and several unresolved issues. There seems to be a tacit agreement among academic researchers that research on TVET colleges is not 'academic' enough to warrant the effort whilst most Ph.D. and Masters Researchers scramble for research on mainstream universities.
Research carried out by prominent authors in TVET education such as McGrath (2002, 2004), Powell (2013) portrays this negligence of researchers through a critical assessment and review of research on South African further education and training colleges in the post-apartheid South Africa (1994 and onwards). Only a mediocre ten masters and doctoral thesis were produced that had FET colleges as their subject area in the period of reconstruction (1994-2003). Whilst there has been a steady inclination in research on TVET colleges since then, much of the research tends to skate over inclusion and disability but focus much on poverty alleviation and job creation (Powell, 2013). The result is that social inclusion and disability inclusion is under-represented.
An instrumental stance has been adopted that emphasizes structure, the college system, the institution, and the economy is foremost. This is done at the expense of human agency, particularly of the students who study at the colleges and the staff who work there (Powell 2013, p.24).
This statement seriously challenges global South Disability studies and academics in higher education institutions (HEIs) in the Southern African region institutions to roll up the proverbial sleeve and start engaging with critical work as there seems to be a serious lack of a critical interrogation with the Scholarship Of Learning (SoL) on disability inclusion within the TVET education and training context.