Abstract
Inclusive education aims to provide equitable learning opportunities for all learners, including those with diverse educational needs. While South Africa’s education policy promotes inclusivity, the awareness and understanding among educators and support staff remains a critical factor in its successful implementation, particularly in special schools. It is important, is therefore, important that teachers and support staff be explored for relevant interventions to be developed to empower teachers and support staff in special schools. The overarching purpose of this study was to explore the awareness and understanding of inclusive education as policy and process among teachers and support staff in a selected special school in the Gauteng Province.
A qualitative research approach was adopted in this study. The reason was that qualitative research is acknowledged as an exploratory mode of research and essential in exploring the lived experiences of participants in naturalistic contexts. The study was designed as a case study involving one special school in the Gauteng Province of South Africa. I chose interviews and participant observation as methods of generating data. The semi-structured interviews and participant observation offered deeper insights into personal experiences and institutional support available for learners. These methods meant that I would spend time in the research context generating rich data.
I purposively sampled teachers as well as support staff in the school. In other words, data were generated from 10 participants, namely eight teachers and two support staff members.
The data were processed through thematic data analysis. I did not go into the field with a priori codes prepared beforehand, instead, I performed open and axial coding of the data. Codes were grouped and assigned to categories. These categories were refined into themes. In processing the data, I followed Braun and Clark’s (2006) six phased system that involves, familiarization with the data, generation of codes, searching for themes, a review of themes, refining and naming of themes, and writing the report. This system enabled me to first have a deeper understanding of the data sets before I processed them...