Access and Success of Students with Disabilities in South African Higher Education: From ‘Pedagogy of the Marginalised’ to ‘Pedagogy of the Disabled’

Student access and success in South African higher education has become a major concern for stakeholders in higher education in the last two decades. The chapter explores and honors the works of the late Professor Michael Cross as one of the leading scholars who have made profound contributions on the subject of epistemic access and success with specific focus on the capacity of students from disadvantaged home and schooling backgrounds to draw from existing capital in challenging their precarious positions. The chapter posits that students particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds remain central to their access and success in higher education. In this chapter, the significance of the works of Cross is extended to understand the experiences of students with disabilities whose precarious position resembles that of disadvantaged students. The chapter highlights how these students’ access and success is shaped by their conscious experience of the institutional cultural domain, the student and the academic community. The chapter utilises the systematic literature review to draw from Cross’s work on epistemic access and access, with the aim of establishing some scholarship insights that can be used to shift scholarship from the ‘pedagogy of the marginalised’ to embrace a ‘pedagogy of the disabled’. This is done through adopting a decolonial analytical framework that has assisted in understanding how students with disabilities utilise the capital and agency they merge with from their disadvantaged backgrounds to deal with challenges of access and success encountered in South African higher education.