ABSTRACT
Traditionally disability centres at universities were established to offer support to students with disabilities and special educational needs. However, the implementation of inclusive education has presented the universities with a mammoth task of totally overhauling their teaching and learning processes and procedures in order that students with disabilities and special educational needs can be educated alongside their peers in an inclusive and less restrictive educative environment. Therefore, the implementation of inclusive education in higher education calls for the renewed strategies of academic planning, pedagogical and curriculum design, infrastructure redesign, deployment of assistive technologies and the development of an inclusive culture which may widen and broaden the participation of diverse students in teaching and learning. This chapter, through a critical realism lens, critically analyses the transition of a university towards inclusive education within the South African context. Through a critical analysis of the literature, the chapter unmasks the underlying relational mechanism for inclusion and exclusion within the framework of notions of epistemic access and deals with organisational barriers for inclusion, epistemology and pedagogical choices, cognitive justice, decolonisation and indigenisation of the curriculum as well as knowledge economy.
