Towards a Disability-inclusive Higher Education Policy through the Capabilities Approach

Students with disabilities’ experience in South African higher education – a synthesis of literature

“…As has been argued by Mutanga and Walker (2015), proponents of the social model seem to have neglected the need to understand the challenges for people with disabilities, not only emanating from the social environment but from other factors such as the individual, environmental, economic and political spheres. As a result of the dominant perspectives on understanding disability, international scholars' attention has now shifted towards developing better understanding of disability by incorporating multiple and intersecting factors (economic, 137 social, environmental, political and cultural barriers) that place restrictions in the way of full inclusion and success of students with disabilities in higher education (Strnadova, Hájková and Květoňová 2015).…”

“…It is not unexpected that students with disabilities make up less than 1 per cent of the total student population in SAHE (FOTIM 2011). Those that make it into higher education have to struggle with physical access (Losinsky et al 2003;Engelbretch and De Beer 2014;Mutanga and Walker 2015) and attitudinal problems of their peers and staff (Howell 2005). There is no full participation for students with disabilities in SAHE (Lourens 2015;Lourens, McKinney and Swartz 2016).…”

‘I Don’t Have Time For This’: Stuttering and the Politics of University Time

“…Since 1994, educational policies and legislation (such as the White Paper 6, the Higher Education Act 101 of 1997 and the South African National Plan for Higher Education) have been implemented to promote and establish inclusive education in South Africa (Ntombela & Soobrayen 2013). In response, South African institutions of higher learning have been designing programmes inclusive of disabled students (Mutanga & Walker 2015;Muthukrishna & Schoeman 2000). Some higher education institutions in South Africa have established Disability Units (DUs) to offer specialised services to disabled students to facilitate access and inclusion of these students at their institutions (FOTIM 2011).…”

Disability, Health and Human Development

“…It has been used by other scholars on a variety of issues including the philosophical grounding of human rights in relation to disability (Venkatapuram 2014), the evaluation of disability-related policies (e.g. Díaz Ruiz et al 2015), the challenges that need to be addressed for education to be disability-inclusive (Mutanga and Walker 2015) and comparative assessments of wellbeing across disability status Trani and Cunning 2013;.…”