The IDEA (Including Disability in Education in Africa) Research Unit has evolved from the university’s TEDI (Teacher Empowerment for Disability Inclusion) project which was created in response to a call to address the exclusion and poor-quality education of children with disabilities in South Africa.
The IDEA research unit has completed and released a digital text book through UCT libraries. This textbook arises from the Teacher Empowerment for Disability Inclusion (TEDI) project, which started in the Division of Disability Studies at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 2017. The aim of this project, which was funded by the Christelike Blinden Mission and the European Union, was to address the shortage of teachers trained in how to include children with disabilities in their classrooms through the development of short courses and massive open online courses (MOOCs). To address this need, the Disability Studies in Education (DSE) course was developed in 2018 as a MOOC, a short course and an accredited course in the postgraduate diploma in Disability Studies at UCT. This textbook will provide a resource not only to UCT students, but also to other students and lecturers at other universities and teaching education institutions. The teaching and learning materials in this textbook were developed by the course convenors and the guest lecturers participating in the course in line with Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles, which increases the choice of learning pathways for students by providing course materials, activities and assessments with multiple forms of representation, expression and engagement. The publication is called Disability Studies in Inclusive Education and is edited by Judith McKenzie, Kofi Nseibo, Chantal Samuels and Amani Karisa.