Accessible and inclusive education: Italian academic commitment to change universities

Starting from the Convention on Rights for Persons with Disabilities, our research seeks to outline the accessibility of academic settings and language for all students. Although the aforementioned Convention ratifies (article 24) that “States Parties shall ensure an inclusive education system at all levels and lifelong learning”– in order to realize the right of persons with disabilities to be educated “without discrimination and on the basis of equal opportunity”, not all the Italian universities can state being inclusive and promoting the accessibility for disabled students. For this reason, we are researching the Italian academic commitment (Santi & Ghedin, 2012) towards inclusiveness (italics our), focusing our attention on the universities of the region Lazio. The main purpose is proposing solution which could make the university an inclusive environment, because – following the 2002 Madrid Declaration – we believe “that education system ensures personal development and social inclusion to make children and young people as independent as possible” (Caldin & Friso, 2016: 35, our own translation). This is obviously very important to ensure an independent life in all kind of situations and contexts. Inclusion seems therefore to be the correct path to be followed in order to reduce distance between people and prevent phenomena of exclusion, even though sometimes the research of inclusion creates itself events of macro/micro-exclusion (D’Alessio, 2013). Hence, the solution is rethinking academic settings – and more generally education and social system – from a new point of view and not from a ‘medicalized’ one. Disability Studies’ perspective (and more specifically Disability Studies in Education and the Independent Living Movement) seems to be the right path to an inclusive education, since it perceives disability not in the person but in the society and in the way society is constructed. Moreover, Disability Studies in Education postulates the idea of building a priori the context in a way that it can be enjoyed by all students, because of the possibility to meet disabled people or all that part of population identified as Special Educational Needs . Here fits our research that aims to a) outline the current situation about accessibility of the academic settings and language used in the Italian university and b) propose solutions to make university an inclusive environment.