Decolonizing inclusive education: Potential contributions of participatory research, postcolonial thinking and Ubuntu worldview
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PURPOSE: This article examines how knowledge production creates and maintains colonial dominance and unequal power relations between the Global North and the Global South, with a focus on the context of international inclusive education. It questions how participatory research approaches can methodologically manage these power relations in international practice settings. Dominant Eurocentric scholarship and knowledge have created processes of Othering to justify the supposed superiority of knowledge and practices from the Global North and the assumed inferiority of knowledge from the South. Thus, it is important to understand how the production of knowledge, in the colonial past and contemporary neocolonial world, is shaped by power dynamics and relations. Inclusive education can play a significant role to help these colonial dynamics and their impact on practices that affect marginalized social groups. These power imbalances influence intercultural and international research projects, especially in the field of inclusion and disability. Despite extensive knowledge about disability in the Global South, Eurocentric and Western knowledge production is largely dominated by the Global North. METHOD: The article offers a dialogue on the extent to which participatory research can methodologically help manage these power relations in international comparative research on disability and inclusion. The paper also discusses limitations and challenges faced by inclusive education researchers navigating global power dynamics and realities. The paper offer recommendations on how to decolonize inclusive education research informed participatory research informed by postcolonial thinking and Ubuntu World views. RESULTS: The theoretical dialogue shows that participatory research, with its ontological and epistemological foundations, is able to decolonize research in the international research context on disability. CONCLUSION: The conclusion of this work is that a foundation of postcolonial theories, participatory research and disability/inclusive education provides a solid ground for initiating a paradigm shift.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.143 | 0.075 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.154 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.026 | 0.026 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.033 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".