What is the focus of your poster?
I am proposing an integrated role of Community Based Workers (CBW) in education. The UN convention for people with disability has focssed people’s right to an education. However, disability as a form of diversity within society has been ignored when it comes to curriculum. Instead, normality is used as a base for education. This has increased the alienation of people with disability within their own school environment.
Community Based Rehabilitation (CBR) and CBW as social development activists need to have a role in integrating and including disability within curricular. The experience of other minority groups can guide the way they manage to include their lives, struggles and successes within the curriculum content/syllabi.
Why is this focus an important issue to consider?
Education establishments’ outcomes seriously affect the way people view disability and disabled people. From the early stage of schooling concepts of being ‘normal’ means being better. Normality means that you can walk, talk, hear and see. Deviation from this version of normal means you are less capable and worth less. As such, one always has reason to treat people who are not ‘normal’ with pity.
CBR as a dynamic system can act as a vehicle to facilitate change in education by focussing on disability.
What is the most important message/conclusion you would like to share with us?
Access to school might be harmful to people with disability if we keep our view of them as people who are lacking. . Equity in education implies an equity of concepts. Ideas we share with about who they are. Currently, educational content positions people with disabilities as different and ‘lacking’ . Its these viewpoints that we provide people with disabiltieis. This will lead to more marginalisation not to inclusion.
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