**8. Discussion**

COVID-19 pandemic has been a challenge for everyone; however, people with disability have experienced greater difficulties. The current chapter aimed at exploring the pedagogical approaches that were adopted to support continued learning for children with disabilities during the COVID-19 pandemic and the challenges experiences as well as key lessons to note.

The findings from the reviewed studies and reports suggest that COVID-19 significantly exacerbated the inequality to access to essential services particularly education for people with disabilities during the lockdown. Parent's reports indicated that they had difficulties including children with disability in livelihood programs, yet they did this with ease to children without disability. The parents reported that the children were lonely further indicating the difficult parents had in socially including these children. Because of the physical, visual, hearing, or cognitive impairments, there is a communication barrier between the children and family members who are normal functioning jeopardizing interaction and socially isolating the child from the rest of the family. This was the case before COVID-19 but which became more evident when children were now spending the whole day at home. Moreover, it appears that parents have limited skills in sign language, let alone more advanced skills such as reading Braille that children with visual impairment need to read.

It is also imperative to note from the reviewed studies that active learning of children with disabilities mainly takes place at school. This finding indicates that parents are less involved in the actual training or learning activities of their children with disability. This could be partly attributed to lack of skills or poor attitude toward disability and education on the part of parents as revealed by the surveys. Furthermore, parents of children with disabilities usually have very low expectations from these children, and this bias down plays their motivation to support their learning in academic and everyday life activities. Consequently, the children have little contact with parents and other family members, and gradually the gap widens and further reducing the opportunity for the parents and siblings to learn how to interact with the child. This family exclusion and inability to support learning became apparent during the pandemic when all children were grounded at home and had to be supported by their parents to continue schooling. Appropriate steps should be taken to promote inclusion at family level through increased awareness and empowering families with skills to supporting learning for their children with different disabilities.

It is clear from the literature that learners with disabilities and their families struggled to access or utilize the education resources provided because they were provided in formats that were not appropriate for them or because the families lacked the necessary skills and technology to support the learner with disability with specialized material. However, in many cases, these resources were not provided at all. This was evidenced in their outcry of lack of contact between children and teachers, and the concern that a lot of the disability support services, e.g. physiotherapy, were school-based. This reveals a gap and a need for a continuum of care and support for learners with disabilities from home to school and within the wider community.

It is also important to note that disability and poverty have a synergistic relationship where disability causes poverty, and poverty aggravates effects of disability, and the two continuously enhance each other if no intervention is introduced [42]. The parents of children with disability decried their challenges in purchasing devices such as Braille machine and books, as well as voice-embedded computers for those with visual impairments to benefit from e-learning that emphasized during

#### *Perspective Chapter: Pedagogical Approaches and Access to Education among Early Childhood… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.104921*

lockdown. Because of extreme poverty, these gadgets were not affordable by most parents from low- and middle-income countries. Financial support including cash transfers to families such as those that that were administered in African countries [4] could enable such parent to access these and other needs including electricity, which is needed for the equipment to work.

Notably, remote learning was academic-oriented with an aim of imparting knowledge for the purpose of mastering concepts and recall, whereas education for a majority of children with disability aims at making them self-reliant and emphasize acquisition of social skills, communication skills, and activities of daily living. Practically, learning for children with disability is individualized, targeting the strength of each individual learner. It is therefore implemented using an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) that could not be implemented using remote learning that replaced face-to-face learning as a result of COVID-19 school closure.

Lastly, we aimed to identify potential strategies and recommendations that could be undertaken to improve the status of learning for children with disabilities during the crisis. Our review indicates that parents need to be empowered through training and active engagements in helping their children with disability with home schooling. They need to be taught skills such as sign language, therapies, and Braille, but also be involved in interventions that aimed at bringing about attitudinal change toward disability and education. Furthermore, homes with children with disability need to be made safe against abusers, and children need to be taught how to protect themselves against abusers and where to seek support in case of abuse. Of note, the extreme poverty levels further incapacitated parents from providing the equipment needed for their children's home schooling should be addressed. Indeed, in contexts where families of vulnerable children received cash transfers, it was clear that these had a significant impact on addressing some of the hardships that they were facing during the pandemic. Such financial supports should be considered by governments.

Importantly, there is need for proper disaster preparedness by governments to guard against adverse effects emerging from future eventualities that would necessitate closure of schools. Practically, this will include allocating sufficient budgets to support necessary response programs, but also involving people with disabilities and their families in making policies, in planning and implementation of the interventions. At the global level, funds such as the Marshall investment [4] should be dedicated to supporting children living in vulnerability including those with disabilities and to enable them recover from the adverse effects caused by the pandemic. However, this can only be achieved if there are sufficient data to enable evidence-informed policies, programs, and budgeting, as well as a deliberate commitment by government to support continued learning for children with disabilities in times of crisis. The immense data challenges on key issues were evident in this review and highlight the need for more research to generate local data on specific indicators of the burden of COVID-19 on education access and well-being of children with disabilities and PWD at large in the African context.

#### **9. Summary and conclusion**

It is evident from the above literature that the COVID-19 pandemic made learning for ECE learners with disabilities in Africa extremely difficult and hence widened the disparities between these children and typically developing children and brought to the forefront the inequity and exclusion that prevail in planning, allocation, and utilization of education resources for people with disabilities. The literature highlights the difficulties in accessing and utilizing disability-specific

pedagogical learning opportunities that early learners with disabilities experienced. It must be noted that these issues not only relate to young learners but to all learners with disabilities in Africa and similar LMICs, making the proposed recommendations relevant to a wider population. In line with the Sustainable Development Goal 4 (ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all) and leaving no one behind, deliberate efforts should be invested in addressing the gaps and challenges at all levels (system, school, and household) to enable children with disabilities achieve their educational goals. Concerted efforts through policy improvements, political will, and change of attitude of all stakeholders including decision-makers, teachers, and communities to promote inclusion and learner-centered interventions for learners with disabilities are likely to make significant impact in enabling these learners access education during the current and future crises.

Key lessons from this literature are that across Africa, children with disabilities still grapple with difficulty in accessing quality education due to exclusion, stigma, lack of specialized skills among teachers and parents, and weak government enforcement, and low financing, among other causes. COVID-19 clearly aggravated these challenges and brought about new ones, e.g., the lack of physical interaction between learners and educators and widened the gap. Nevertheless, all is not lost, and a lot can be done to improve the status quo.

It is important to recognize the urgent need for building the education system back better, through concerted efforts, at all levels, and combining the preexisting and new approaches to address the access and utilization gap for children with disabilities. Political will in terms of committing more government funds and enforcement into policies and their implementation, effective inclusive planning, capacity building, and skills strengthening as well as utilizing local evidence to develop the interventions are critical for rolling back the challenges affecting learning of children with disabilities in the pre and post COVID-19 era. Of note, contextual and system barriers particularly household poverty, and limited government resources, and the negative community attitude toward PLD in general, which act as substrates, the inequity must be addressed. Furthermore, innovations and technologies must take into account the diverse needs of all learners particularly those with disabilities, and they should be suited to the local context, for them to yield maximum benefit for all learners.

It is apparent that African governments were ill-prepared to deal with the sudden disruptions COVID-19 caused in the education system, and indeed these countries were hard hit. This is an eye opener for governments to invest in disaster preparedness not only for education but for all sectors. Our experience from this review reveals the fact that there is limited information on the impact COVID-19 had on education, how learners navigated the challenges but also to what extent education policies were aligned with inclusion of children with disabilities, and challenges that were encountered. More post-pandemic surveys are recommended to fully understand the impact in order to institute appropriate measures to roll back the effects, but also plan better pedagogical approaches that optimize learning for all learners today and in future crises.

#### **9.1 Limitations**

The evidence discussed above is based on literature currently available in the African countries on the impact of COVID-19 on education access for learners with disability, including gray literature, which may be subject to reporting bias. The findings are majorly obtained from qualitative self-reported experiences of learners with disabilities or their families and hence a risk for reporting or social desirability *Perspective Chapter: Pedagogical Approaches and Access to Education among Early Childhood… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.104921*

bias and subjectivity particularly exaggeration of the difficulties reported with expectation of some kind of support to be provided. To date, there are generally scanty data from the education service providers (teachers) perspective and policy, and hence, a knowledge gap that calls for more research.
