The impact of school culture on the academic progress of deaf learners in Tanzanian inclusive schools

Abstract

The learning situation of deaf students in inclusive secondary education in Tanzania has witnessed a decade of struggle and choice on the best inclusion modality. This has resulted in an inconsistency in the accommodation of deaf students in inclusive schools. In this respect, this study was conducted to explore how the culture of a school has contributed to the academic progress of deaf students in the first decade of inclusive education. The study, therefore, employed phenomenology methods in collecting and analysing the data. The findings show that schools have not been able to change their cultures to accommodate deaf students. Hence, the learning of most students in secondary education takes place in a regular culture of the school. As a result, most of them have not only failed to reach the next levels of their education cycle but also dropped out of school. Therefore, we recommend that for to build an equitable learning space for deaf students in an inclusive school, the curriculum should be adapted to the bimodal-bicultural model.