Inclusive Education in the Age of Generative AI: A Theoretical Framework of Personalisation, Accommodation and Substitution for Students with Disabilities
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.68854/hrb95073Keywords:
inclusive education, students with disabilities, generative AI, personalised learning, accommodation, substitution, universal design for learning, learner agency, teachers, AfricaAbstract
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) can now produce, on demand, what inclusive education has promised for three decades and seldom delivered: material rewritten for a particular reader, explanations in the form a particular student needs, and reading and writing support available at any hour without a specialist in the room. The question this paper asks is under what conditions that capacity produces inclusion rather than a quieter form of segregation. The problem is that the literatures on generative AI in education and on inclusive education have developed apart: the first measures learning gains and dependence, the second asks about presence, participation and belonging, and neither can say when an AI-supported student has been included and when the task has simply been taken away from them. The paper is a theoretical synthesis. Drawing on inclusive pedagogy, universal design for learning, self-determination theory, the social model of disability and the accommodation logic of educational measurement, and on peer-reviewed research published between 2023 and 2026 on generative AI in education, on students with disabilities and on inclusive education in African school systems, it distinguishes three things an AI system can do for a disabled learner: personalise content, provide accommodation, and substitute for effort. The first two advance inclusion; the third undermines it, because an accommodation is meant to remove a barrier to the task rather than the task itself, and the line between the two is drawn by the learning objective, not by the tool. The framework is set out in nine propositions covering the classification of AI uses, the shifting roles of teachers, special educators and peers, the system-level risk that AI accommodation becomes a cheap substitute for human support and physical accessibility, the conditions under which learner agency survives, and the infrastructural and linguistic conditions that govern whether any of this reaches African classrooms. Recommendations are made for ministries of education, examination bodies, teacher-education institutions, school leaders, disabled people's organisations and researchers, with particular attention to school systems in which specialist support is scarcest.
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