Dr. Paul Butakor, a lecturer in the Department of Teacher Education, has delivered the last lecture for the year for the Department of Teacher Education monthly seminar series. He spoke on the topic: Inclusive Education in Ghana: Differing Perceptions among Teachers.
In the presentation, Dr. Butakor noted that social and inclusive education is a major objective under the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and this has led most countries to implement policies to ensure education for all. He stressed that, inclusive education recognizes that learners come from diverse backgrounds with varied characteristics, and have different learning capacities and varied levels of cognitive development. He emphasized that incorporating all categories of learners and making provision for varying cognitive abilities of people in mainstream educational institutions, would contribute significantly to building inclusive societies.
Dr. Butakor explained that, though implementation of policies on inclusion by various governments have led to improvements in inclusion in Ghana’s educational sector; there are still many outstanding challenges in our education system. Some of these challenges include the prejudiced perception of persons with special needs, architectural barriers leading to inability or difficulty of persons with special needs in accessing facilities, inadequate assessment facilities, inaccessible and inflexible curricula, and the lack of pre and post-training in special education needs for regular teachers.
Dr. Butakor also shared with the audience, results of his research which examined “Ghanaian teachers’ perception towards Inclusive Education”. The seminar was chaired by Dr. Fred Boateng, and was well attended by faculty and students. During question time, participants made interesting contributions and gave useful suggestions on what can be done in a sustainable manner to make education more inclusive and available to all.