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Abstract
Inclusive education is described as an 'apprenticeship in democracy' as it is concerned with the identification and dismantling of exclusionary practices in schools. One such practice is grade repetition, which is known to result in school disaffection and early school leaving. In South Africa, grade repetition is disproportionately experienced by black and poor learners, resulting in the unequal realization of the democratic right to education. The rate of grade repetition in this country is high, but little is known about teachers' beliefs about the practice. This article presents the results of a self-administered questionnaire in which Johannesburg teachers described what they regarded as the benefits and drawbacks of grade repetition. The data showed that teachers believe that the additional time spent in a repeated year compensates for immaturity, allows learners to 'catch up' and be better prepared for the subsequent grade. Teachers do acknowledge negative emotional and behavioural consequences of grade repetition, but many see no drawbacks to the practice. These beliefs are discussed with reference to the context in which they are engendered, with particular focus on the strong teacher and curriculum control over the pace at which knowledge acquisition is expected. It is argued that addressing the high levels of grade repetition will need critical examination of both the teacher beliefs that sustain the practice and the habits of schools that make failure inevitable for some learners.

Inclusive education is described as an 'apprenticeship in democracy' as it is concerned with the identification and dismantling of exclusionary practices in schools. One such practice is grade repetition, which is known to result in school disaffection and early school leaving. In South Africa, grade repetition is disproportionately experienced by black and poor learners, resulting in the unequal realization of the democratic right to education. The rate of grade repetition in this country is high, but little is known about teachers' beliefs about the practice. This article presents the results of a self-administered questionnaire in which Johannesburg teachers described what they regarded as the benefits and drawbacks of grade repetition. The data showed that teachers believe that the additional time spent in a repeated year compensates for immaturity, allows learners to 'catch up', and be better prepared for the subsequent grade. Teachers do acknowledge negative emotional and behavioural consequences of grade repetition, but many see no drawbacks to the practice. These beliefs are discussed with reference to the context in which they are engendered, with particular focus on the strong teacher and curriculum control over the pace at which knowledge acquisition is expected. It is argued that addressing the high levels of grade repetition will need critical examination of both the teacher beliefs that sustain the practice, and the habits of schools that make failure inevitable for some learners.

Many universities offer undergraduate and postgraduate courses in inclusive education. There has been much research into the impact of these courses, but little is written about their design. This article focuses on a master's course in inclusive education in a South African university. The course positions inclusive education as a critical education project and is designed around the four propositions presented by Slee in The Irregular School (2011. Milton Park: Routledge). Using Bernsteinian ideas about pedagogising knowledge, this article accounts for the pedagogical choices made in content selection and course design. The focal questions in the course are described, together with an indication of the range of additional texts that students read. Given that Slee asserts that inclusive education is a political project, and that Allan (2010. "The Inclusive Teacher Educator: Spaces for Civic Engagement." Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 31 (4): 411–422) urges inclusive teacher educators to reorientate themselves towards civic duty, I argue that producing a pedagogic discourse of inclusive education is a political task that should result in both the teacher educator and the students being oriented towards a critique of existing exclusionary arrangements and an activism that leads to change.

This book reflects a range of pedagogical responses to increasingly complex educational contexts. It finds this complexity in the interplay of a number of factors, including the diverse histories and identities of educational actors; institutional and systemic demands and constraints; competing conceptions of valued knowledge; and technological change. The chapters show the demand for pedagogical response to unexpected and unprecedented events (like COVID-19) and the importance of addressing barriers to access that become sedimented into institutional cultures. The authors, mostly from Global South contexts, are concerned with enabling educational access and inclusion in the face of competing global and local demands. They present new knowledge about pedagogical approaches that are relevant and effective in uncertain times and challenging places. Together, the contributors offer accounts of hope-full and innovative practice and conceptually rigorous engagement with fundamental issues of learning and teaching.

Many disabled children are not attending schools in South Africa, despite policies that promote inclusive education. Quite often, online news articles (re)visit this topic. Using a critical literacy approach, and informed by critical disability studies, this chapter analyses online news articles, showing that certain tropes are rehearsed. These are an emphasis on the large numbers of disabled children out of school, individual stories of educational neglect, and critiques of teachers, schools, and the government. These tropes have the effect of casting the education of disabled children in South Africa as problem, rather than a right. The problem is presented as so overwhelming that it is ultimately unsolvable. Disabled children and their families are portrayed as the pitiable victims of unfortunate circumstances with detailed stories that emphasise their 'otherness'. We argue that instead of promoting affirming disability awareness and advocacy, and locating the experiences of disabled children and young people within a context of systemic discrimination and oppression, the articles do little more than evoke shock and pity. We call for news articles to portray disability in more complex and nuanced ways, which allows individual agency without resorting to stereotypes, and to challenge ableist views of disability as deficit.

Background: Persons with disabilities continue to be excluded from professions in South Africa despite legislation on non-discrimination and equity. Objectives: We sought to identify both the opportunities and obstacles that students with disabilities face in professional degrees. Method: Selected texts from the South African and international literature were analysed and synthesised. Results: Students with disabilities are afforded opportunities to graduate into professions through the current climate of transformation, inclusion and disability policies, various support structures and funding. These opportunities are mitigated by obstacles at both the higher education site and at the workplace. At university, they may experience difficulties in accessing the curriculum, disability units may be limited in the support they can offer, policies may not be implemented, funding is found to be inadequate and the built environment may be inaccessible. Fieldwork poses additional obstacles in terms of public transport which is not accessible to students with disabilities; a lack of higher education support extended to the field sites, and buildings not designed for access by people with disabilities. At both sites, students are impacted by negative attitudes and continued assumptions that disability results from individual deficit, rather than exclusionary practices and pressures. Conclusion: It is in the uniqueness of professional preparation, with its high demands of both theory and practice that poses particular obstacles for students with disabilities. We argue for the development of self-advocacy for students with disabilities, ongoing institutional and societal transformation and further research into the experiences of students with disabilities studying for professional degrees.

Exclusionary pressures and practices are pervasive in education, despite the clamour for more inclusive education. Even as classrooms worldwide become more diverse, education is unlikely to become inclusive without deliberate efforts to dismantle exclusion and enable inclusion. This book is a compilation of contributions to the conversation about what these efforts might entail. The conversation has its origins in the Making Education Inclusive Conference held in 2013, which brought together academics and practitioners from Southern Africa and other countries. Given the expectation that teache

BACKGROUND: The popularity of social prescribing has grown in recent years following a series of high-profile recommendations in scientific reviews, political reports, and media coverage. Social prescribing has the potential to address multiple health and social problems, but few studies have examined how it works. AIM: To explore the ways by which social prescribing may be beneficial to individuals undertaking socially prescribed activity (SPA). DESIGN AND SETTING: A qualitative interview study involving people attending a range of SPA. METHOD: Participants were purposively recruited from a multi-activity social prescribing provider. Data were collected using semi-structured face-to-face interviews. Analysis used a thematic approach, in which emerging themes were contextualised with interview transcripts and findings from existing literature. RESULTS: The study identified five themes, which together formed a journey of engagement and participation. While not always present for any one individual, the themes occurred in a consistent order: receiving professional support for social problems; engaging with others through participation in SPA; learning different ways to relate to other people and developing new skills; changing perceptions by realising personal assets and becoming open to the possibility of new futures; and developing a positive outlook on the present while moving forwards in pursuit of future goals and better health. CONCLUSION: SPA appears to benefit individuals by a process that begins with personalised professional help to address social problems and moves through engagement with activities and others, to the recognition of personal and social assets and opportunities.

We define quantitative map literacy (QML), a cross between map literacy and quantitative literacy (QL), as the concepts and skills required to accurately read, use, interpret, and understand the quantitative information embedded in a geospatial representation of data on a geographic background. Long used as tools in technical geographic fields, maps are now a common vehicle for communicating quantitative information to the public. As such, QML has potential to stand alongside health numeracy and financial literacy as an identifiable subdomain of transdisciplinary QL. What concepts and skills are crucial for QML? The obvious answer is, "It depends on the type of map." Therefore, our first task, and the subject of this paper, is to develop a framework to think and talk about the panoply of maps in a way that permits us to consider the range and distribution of QML content. We use an equilateral triangular plot to conceptualize maps in terms of locational information (L), thematic information (T), and generalization-distortion (G-D), and parameterize the plot with an L/T ratio (horizontal; reflecting the historical practice of cartographers to distinguish locational-reference maps from thematic maps) and G-D levels increasing from base to apex. We show positions for a wide variety of maps (e.g., topographic maps, weather maps, engineering-survey plots, subway maps, maps of air routes, a cartoon map of Orlando for tourists, driving-time maps, county-wide population maps, county-wide multivariable population and income maps, world political map, land use maps, and cartograms). The analysis of how these maps vary across the triangle allows us to proceed with an examination of how QML varies across the panoply of maps.

We define quantitative map literacy (QML), a cross between map literacy and quantitative literacy (QL), as the concepts and skills required to accurately read, use, interpret, and understand the quantitative information embedded in a geospatial representation of data on a geographic background. Long used as tools in technical geographic fields, maps are now a common vehicle for communicating quantitative information to the public. As such, QML has potential to stand alongside health numeracy and financial literacy as an identifiable subdomain of transdisciplinary QL. What concepts and skills are crucial for QML? The obvious answer is, "It depends on the type of map." Therefore, our first task, and the subject of this paper, is to develop a framework to think and talk about the panoply of maps in a way that permits us to consider the range and distribution of QML content. We use an equilateral triangular plot to conceptualize maps in terms of locational information (L), thematic information (T), and generalization-distortion (G-D), and parameterize the plot with an L/T ratio (horizontal; reflecting the historical practice of cartographers to distinguish locational-reference maps from thematic maps) and G-D levels increasing from base to apex. We show positions for a wide variety of maps (e.g., topographic maps, weather maps, engineering-survey plots, subway maps, maps of air routes, a cartoon map of Orlando for tourists, driving-time maps, county-wide population maps, county-wide multivariable population and income maps, world political map, land use maps, and cartograms). The analysis of how these maps vary across the triangle allows us to proceed with an examination of how QML varies across the panoply of maps.

AbstractThis paper draws on empirical evidence from a 3‐year research project in Northern Uganda examining the educational experiences of refugees with disabilities. The authors present the compounded and interrelated challenges children with disabilities and their families face as they navigate their educational experiences and seek out opportunities to live well. The authors seek to make a contribution towards improving educational experiences by first highlighting compounding challenges faced by refugee children living with disabilities and their families and related policy gaps that have ramifications for refugee children's access to education in particular, and second by expanding discourse about refugee children with disabilities agency in relation to these liminal gaps and the impact the gaps have for accessing education. The authors use Powell and McGrath's (in Skills for human development: Transforming vocational education and training, Routledge, 2019; Handbook of vocational education and training, Springer, 2019) concept of critical capabilities and relationality, to expand Klocker's (in Global perspectives on rural childhood and youth: Young rural lives, Routledge, 2007) notions of thick and thin agency and to interrogate refugee children living with disabilities' agency in relation to education opportunities and rights.

International conventions acknowledge the right of refugees and of disabled people to access quality inclusive education. Both groups struggle to assert this right, particularly in the Global South, where educational access may be hindered by system constraints, resource limitations and negative attitudes. Our concern is the intersectional and compounding effect of being a disabled refugee in Sub-Saharan Africa. Disabled refugees have been invisible in policy and service provision, reliable data is very limited, and there has been little research into their experiences of educational inclusion and exclusion. This article makes the case for research to address this gap. Three country contexts (South Africa, Zimbabwe and Uganda) are presented to illustrate the multi-layered barriers and challenges to realizing the rights for disabled refugees in educational policy and practice. These three countries host refugees who have fled civil unrest and military conflict, economic collapse and natural disaster, and all have signed the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. None has available and reliable data about the numbers of disabled refugees, and there is no published research about their access to education. Arguing for an inclusive and intersectional approach and for the importance of place and history, we illustrate the complexity of the challenge. This complexity demands conceptual resources that account for several iterative and mutually constituting factors that may enable or constrain access to education. These include legislation and policy, bureaucracy and resource capacity, schools and educational institutions, and community beliefs and attitudes. We conclude with a call for accurate data to inform policy and enable monitoring and evaluation. We advocate for the realization of the right to education for disabled refugee students and progress towards the realization of quality inclusive education for all.