Worldwide, COVID-19 has affected the most deprived communities the hardest and exposed many systemic inequalities, leaving nations vulnerable and destitute. The need for quality education, while heeding to international mandates, including enacting the sustainable development goals (SDG), has become more apparent in promoting equitable and inclusive education for all, which remains a challenge in South Africa with its inherited inequalities. The purpose of this study was to understand how the COVID-19 challenge refocused the commitment of five principals from rural schools in two education districts of the Northern Cape province of South Africa to address resurfaced historic inequalities, including digital access and fluency to attain an equitable learning environment. Semi-structured emailed interviews were conducted with the participants. A thematic analysis of their experiences of the pandemic through the lens of flexible learning theory, revealed that teachers and learners often experienced discrimination-related stress, especially with virtual learning approaches, as schools often cannot offer remote services to advance learning. Furthermore, the participants voiced their uncompromising commitment to inclusion while engaging teachers and learners in identifying possible problems and proposing solutions post-COVID-19. Though the current crisis seems to have perpetuated and deepened existing inequalities in disadvantaged rural South African schools, some school principals are hopeful that as the reality has now been laid bare, it may prompt more urgent action. The paper recommends that school principals and teachers will have to refocus teaching practices towards flexible, inclusively delivered teaching through working collaboratively across disciplines so that they build their personal resilience and advance their technological skills to meet the demands of remote and online learning during a pandemic and beyond.

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Technology-based platforms in higher education institutions (HEIs), including online learning, require innovative approaches to ensure inclusive and transformative educational spaces for students living with disabilities. Achieving social equality, technology access and inclusion may contribute to ensuring a seamless instructional design for students living with disabilities in HEIs amid and beyond COVID-19. COVID-19 has obliged HEIs to adopt alternatives to learning and teaching, making the use of open distance learning (ODL) amid the pandemic more relevant. This theoretical paper considers the significance of ODL by demonstrating how to achieve technology inclusion for students living with disabilities through collaborative online international learning (COIL). Situated within the collaborative learning theory, this paper offers a disability perspective to learning in HEIs, through an analysis of stipulations in the Strategic Policy Framework on Disability for the Post-School Education and Training System (2018). The findings indicate that the application of COIL for students living with disabilities may transform their learning experiences and unlock new pathways for their development. The paper recommends that COIL may be used as a response to ensuring access and inclusive education provision for students living with disabilities in HEIs.

Transforming the learning experiences of pre-service teachers with disabilities from stigma and social exclusion to experiencing a sense of belonging, is a desirable imperative for learning mediators in the South African Higher Education (SAHE) context. This paper presents a relational content analysis of the concepts, theories and policies, related to effecting transformation in the meaning schemes of pre-service teachers with disabilities and to provide HEIs with inclusive responses to addressing their learning support needs. The theory of perspective transformation, which highlights the process of effecting change in a frame of reference, is applied. The theory expands on three dimensions, including psychological (changes in understanding of the self), convictional (revision of belief systems) and behavioural (changes in lifestyle) with a sound foundation of inclusion aimed at drawing on practices for the prevention of exclusion of the pre-service teacher with disabilities in SAHE spaces. The paper further analyses discourses extracted from Section 47 of the Salamanca Statement, (1994) that build on inclusion artefacts in addressing perspective transformation.  The findings in terms of belonging show that affirmations of the discourses, related to an interpersonal connection with others, have the scope to affect pre-service teachers with disabilities’ need for a positive regard as a prerequisite to foster the inclusion of individuals within any given relationship. This paper recommends that SAHE institutions embrace an ethos of inclusivity to achieve transformative equity for pre-service teachers with disabilities and offers an inclusive response framework to ensure that they are able to participate, learn and be welcomed as appreciated associates of HEIs.

The inception of lockdowns by governments across the globe to control the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed many disparities in rural societies, particularly on the African continent. The social, cultural, and psychological processes have elicited variations in teachers’ responses to the devastating pandemic, illuminating African cultural realities in the quest for creating quality delivery of teaching and learning in schools. When teachers regard themselves as transformative change agents and not merely as oppressed people, this confirms their social identities and cultures and afford them opportunities to engage in critical reflection on the messages they convey in their classrooms. This case study employs semiotic analysis to explore some socio-cultural messages and emotional behaviours teachers exchange unwittingly in schools. Interviews were conducted via e-mail, as face-to-face contact with the respondents was not possible. The findings indicate that teachers conceive of themselves as disempowered “lay people” who are ill-equipped to respond adequately to situations such as the coronavirus pandemic, but are, nonetheless, “accountable” to the communities they serve. As its contribution, this paper presents teachers with the Social-Emotional coping skills of individual awareness, social awareness, and self-discovery, to help them thrive during periods of uncertainty. A semiotic reflection on the learning environment may empower teachers with inclusive and transformative strategies for ensuring their own and learners’ emotional well-being in a non-threatening learning environment beyond COVID 19.

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