The study explores the existence of the seemingly latent potential, ability, and willingness of disabled people to participate in tourism education programmes by using the social model of disability. Consequently, unveiling the cause and effective intervention thereof. A qualitative research design enabled in-depth face-to-face interviews and Facebook group discussions collected data from disabled people. This research method allowed the researchers to gain relevant information from the real-life experiences of participants. A difference in opinion was observed between participants already enrolled at education institutions and not enrolled participants. However, all believe they have the potential, ability, and willingness to participate in tourism education programmes. The literature shows tourism education facilities as overlooking biases, stigmatisation and discriminatory practices to disabled people, deeming them unable, incapable and unwilling to study for tourism degrees. While results show effort to accommodate and enrol disabled participants, challenges and struggles remain due to underlying obstacles. Clearly, the social model of disability exposed that if the potential, ability, and willingness of disabled people to participate in tourism education programmes remain invisible to tourism educators, the participation, involvement and thriving of disabled people may continue to be compromised. Therefore, the articles provide steps to enhance inclusion.
Background: Despite objective arguments for inclusive education, there is a dearth of mechanisms to reduce dropouts amongst disabled learners in the extant literature. Thus, this article is one of the outputs of a study, which was conducted after a consistent observation of dwindling numbers of disabled learners who succeed in basic education in South Africa. Of late, the dropout rate increased because of adherence to lock down regulations amidst the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. This triggered the need for research on co-creating interventions to mitigate the rate of dropouts amongst disabled learners.Objective: The article explores underlying obstacles that induce school dropouts for disabled learners amidst and post-COVID-19 and postulates interventions accordingly.Methods: Descriptive-narrative research upheld reality as emerging from empirical experiences of parents and guardians of disabled children, heads of primary and secondary schools, social workers, the Department of Social Development and Basic Education, and provincial associations for disabled persons that focus on children. Lived experience-based opinions were obtained from provinces with different economic growth, namely, Limpopo and Gauteng. Forty-one in-depth one-on-one interviews and two focus group discussions used Google Meet. The collected data were analysed using Creswell’s qualitative data analysis framework (steps) and Atlas.ti.8.Results: The findings show a consistent pattern that the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the parents and guardians’ fear of exposing and risking their learners to the health crisis. Based on the parents and guardians’ narrative, mainstream school administrations discriminate and are unwilling to enrol disabled learners. Furthermore, the narrative from the school leadership shows that teachers use exclusive teaching and learning methods for the enrolled disabled learners because of ignorance, misconception, misunderstanding, misinterpretation of disability, disability inclusion, and reasonable accommodation.Conclusion: Based on the finding, it is clear that dropouts amongst disabled learners can be alleviated by using a systematic multi-stakeholder local community-based intervention approach. This, therefore, implies that government authorities and agencies should incorporate disability into mainstream policies that guide planning, budgeting, staffing, and mobilisation of other resources. This would ideally enhance the provision of learning opportunities to disabled learners whilst supporting their diverse educational needs without dichotomies set by ‘ability and disability’, or normal and abnormal. In this manner, inclusive education can contribute to the educational success of disabled learners through developing sustainability and resilience amongst disabled learners.
Background: South African tourism is evolving towards accommodating disabled people. Within the same standpoint, the country receives ageing tourists as a major international tourism market from the Global North, whose access needs are similar to disabled people. The present article explored ‘blind and blank spots’ in the extant literature on tourism–impairment disability as a synchronised field within academic research to provide theoretical insights and gaps for the disability-tourism research community to consider the composite concept instead of individualistic concepts.Objective: The objectives were: (1) to track knowledge development from 1990 to 2018 using a narrative literature review approach and (2) to justify future research areas previously overlooked and understudied within a tourism–impairments–disability perspective in South Africa and beyond.Method: A narrative literature review search strategy was used. Keywords and synonymous terms were used in electronic searches of Scopus, ScienceDirect, Sabinet Online, Emerald Insights Journals, African Journals and Google Scholar. The literature screening process used predetermined inclusion and exclusion criteria for the data source. Content thematic analysis was adopted for the present study.Results: The findings reflect a dearth of tourism–impairments–disability research in South Africa. Nonetheless, there is an observable pattern of slow growth in research after the 2000s. The extant literature is skewed towards the tourism supply side and sporadic on tourism demand (tourist experiences), education and skills development.Conclusions: It is clear that the absence of scientifically developed knowledge on disability–impairments–tourism affects inclusive tourism growth. Therefore, the research community should consider disability-inclusive (accessible) tourism management, human resources and marketing practices and knowledge for teaching material in future research.Contribution: The article mapped and provided insights that sets a research agenda for tourism research community to see the gaps in literature and/or knowledge for accessible tourism (disability-inclusive) tourism to be a game changer as found by UNWTO (2020) with low-resources setting. Thereby setting a tone towards call for more research that can uncover an economic narrative that shows a relationship between skills development, labour and consumer markets for the participation of diverse disabled persons as such is shown as understudied in Low-to-Middle income earning countries like South Africa.
Disability inclusion in diving tourism is a relevant topic of study, considering the documented benefits to disabled communities, the growing demand for inclusive diving tourism opportunities globally, and the limited information on the status quo. This qualitative study assessed the perspectives on disability inclusion in diving tourism among 28 diving industry members (who were not disabled divers) and one representative (who was a disabled diver) from the largest disabled diving organisation in South Africa, which is an important diving destination internationally. Benefits, challenges, involvement, and specific perspectives in inclusive diving tourism were captured through thematic analysis of participants’ narratives. The results confirmed the multidimensional benefits of diving to disabled people and highlighted barriers to inclusive diving tourism related to logistics, knowledge, awareness and attitude of the industry, marketing, and collaboration between stakeholders. This study drew useful recommendations to enhance disability inclusion in diving tourism and exploit its potential for the development of this industry.
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