Inclusion of students with disabilities in higher education: demands of a reconfiguration of knowledge, conceptions and teaching practices

Abstract

The text discusses about the challenge of including students with disabilities on the higher education system, choosing as main topics the access policies, the perception of students about accessibility and the identification of barriers and challenges that universities and professors face. The research was based on a qualitative exploratory approach. The research corpus consists of reports by subjects of three public institutions: UFC, UECE and UERN, it was collected through semi-structured interviews, under analysis about the permanence of subjects and their daily life experienced there in the places they work. Evidences show the overcoming of standard conceptions about development and learning, the strengthen of the understanding of the differences, the need of establishing a new rationality in the higher education system and the overcoming of several barriers to the participation and to the learning, as well as it indicates a demand of institutional policies to social inclusion, architectural issues as a noticeable obstacle for all, and that there are some pedagogical practices that corroborate to that situation.