Educating across cultures : questioning the social model of disability

Abstract

This chapter draws from previous work on the social model across cultures (Grech, 2009), and extends from my contribution in the recent edited collection Making sense of inclusive education: Where everyone belongs (Azzopardi, 2010), where I engaged with a number of critical issues in inclusive education in non-Western contexts characterised by widespread poverty. II is perhaps fit to start this chapter with an emphasis on the fact that there is no universally agreed definition of disability (lngstad and Whyte, 1995). This task is made even more difficult across cultures where different definitions (e.g. in government policies) and measurement instruments (e.g. censuses and surveys) mean different populations are considered disabled in different contexts. [excerpt]