Educating Children with Neurodevelopmental Disorders in a Nigerian Context. Perspectives and Lived Experiences

Abstract

The United Nations has developed a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity going into the future known as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). One of the goals - Goal 4, is to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education for all. Nigeria, a member of the United Nations, demonstrates a desire to achieve inclusive and equitable quality education, especially for children with disabilities. Yet, despite some progress in the creation of a legislative framework for inclusion, education remains inaccessible for many children with disabilities in Nigeria. According to the World Bank, poverty, poorly trained teachers, lack of learning materials and poor implementation of policies have been identified as reasons children with disabilities may not be accessing education. However, one area that remains unclear is the practicality of the provisions of current educational policies for education users and how they navigate their education journeys. Additionally, while some research has already been done by other scholars focusing on policy gaps, stigmatisation and the need for teacher training, very little is known about the educational experiences of children with disabilities and their parents presented from their perspectives. Where studies have been found on children and parents’ voices, they have only focused on children with physical/sensory disabilities. To address the gap and contribute to the work that has been done by previous scholars, this two-part qualitative exploratory study grounded in the Southern theoretical approaches was conducted. In the first part, a critical policy analysis of nine disability and inclusive education legislations and policies in Nigeria was undertaken using the sociology of knowledge approach to discourse analysis. This analysis provided a detailed and nuanced illumination of how disability and education statutes and policies have interacted and continues to interact with the social inequality phenomenon of disabilities. It also highlights the implications (including unintended consequences) of such interactions for children with disabilities and their parents, especially those with neurodevelopmental disorders (ND). These findings then facilitated an assessment of the alignment of the statutes and policies with the values and expectations of stakeholders, which was enacted for the second part of the study. In the second part of the study, focusing on two categories of ND- Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Attention Deficit Hyper Activity Disorder (ADHD), 12 case studies were undertaken to understand how parents are currently supporting their children to access primary education in Lagos State, Nigeria. Specifically, using in-depth semi-structured interviews, the factors that influence parents’ schooling preferences, the role that parents play in the education of their children and parents’ experiences of accessing education as well as how they interpret those experiences were investigated. Parents’ narratives showed mothers have been at the forefront and played a crucial and transformative role in their children’s education. Furthermore, this study elicited the voices of seven children diagnosed with ASD and/or ADHD to understand how they experience education in mainstream and special school settings. Using ethically robust and creative multi-participatory methods, verbal interviews, talking mats, picture books, play and classroom observations and interactive activities were utilised to uncover what children learn, how they learn, the relationships that impact upon their education and their aspirations. The children’s reflections demonstrated that they have overall positive experiences in their current schools, although they found some aspects of their learning challenging. Following these findings, I make four key arguments in this study. Firstly, incorporating mothers’ voices and enhancing their participation in the education of children with disabilities is hugely beneficial for creating inclusive quality education systems, which has implications for children’s outcomes as well as parental well-being. Mothers play a transformative role in the education of their children with ND. However, in the absence of a supportive education or social protection system, decision-making for education is tough, comes at a huge cost financially and non-financially as well as having significant implications for mothers’ psychological well-being. Secondly, despite an emerging legal framework for disability inclusion in Nigeria, there continues to be a systemic othering of children with disabilities, especially those with ND, as evidenced by their non-prioritisation in education agendas. Furthermore, the often ignored impacts of othering, power relations and education policies built on colonial legacies hamper the interpretation and implementation of these policies and result in the continued exclusion of children with disabilities. Thirdly, including the voices of children with ND in education decision-making is necessary and possible with patient listening built on the commitment to hear and understand what is being communicated. Children with such disorders neither lack a voice nor the capacity to express these. Therefore, more effort must be put into incorporating them into decision-making concerning their education. Lastly, inclusion does not happen by accident and requires governmental commitment that is shown both in words and actions. However, this must begin with a shift away from colonial ways of knowing and the notion of foreigners as experts. By considering the enablers within the education system, such as those identified in this study, we can generate local knowledge that is contextually situated for policies and practices that can address the continued exclusion of children with disabilities from education.