Education of people with disabilities: a capability-context framework of culture

Abstract

People with disabilities find themselves at the margins of ideas on education in the rights-based and the agency-focused frameworks (the capability approach). This article socially situates the rights-based framework to extend agency as an educational opportunity to make it participatory in cross-cultural contexts, and individually locates the agency-focused framework to enhance agency as multi-dimensional educational experience-outcome journeys across cultural contexts. This extended scope of rights and enhanced capacity of agency is advanced as the capability-context framework of culture. The framework focuses on analytically distinct yet connected emerging agents with capabilities of both dialogical discourses (retrospective reflexivity – macro-mechanisms) and dialectic narratives (bounded participation – micro-structures), which can provide access to deep social structures, and their many ways of being (micro-mechanisms) and specific ways of doing (macro-structures) that enable, but also disable the social choices of people with disabilities, to open new possibilities for them, and for all across contexts.