Decolonising Inclusive Education: New Approaches for Disability Education Policy and Practices

Inclusion of children with disabilities in education has long been debated as a global North project, which should be understood as contextual to the management of social diversity following World War II, including the end of colonialism and the tension between global and local cultures. However, increasingly transnational policy mobility processes contributed to the exportation of inclusion from the global North and re-enacting it in the global South, reproducing neo-colonial forms of oppression through education policies and practices which disregarded and discarded local education approaches. By mobilising post-structural tools and assemblage theory and drawing upon qualitative data collected during the year-long DIGITAL (Diversifying Inclusion and Growth: Inclusive Technologies for Accessible Learning) in the time of Coronavirus project, this chapter deploys experiences of teachers and community leaders from the global South and North during the Covid-19 pandemic to rewrite inclusion and disability from a decolonial perspective. We merge critical studies of inclusion, critical disability studies and decolonial studies in education to envisage teaching and learning practices mobilised by decolonialised and inclusive epistemologies and create a space to rethink disability policies from culturally relevant and validating perspectives.