We define fear as a psychosocial concept owing to its roots in cultural, historical and socio-economic contexts. The literature highlights the multiple dimensions and connections of fear in social interactions between individuals with disabilities and non-disabled others (Adolphs 2013; Agbenyega 2003, 2006; Barclay 2017). Following this insight, fear of disability is understood as a complex, multimodal emotional state that arises in response to perceived threats, compelling individuals to adopt protective behaviour when encountering persons with disabilities. This perspective aligns with the African understanding that individuals with disabilities possess unique strengths; this contrasts with Eurocentric views that often equate disability with weakness (Barclay 2017). Barclay (2017) explains that Eurocentric views about disability are rooted in the medical model that projects disability as a deficiency or impairment, emphasising individual limitations in contributing to society.

The notion of disability as weakness is shaped by a somatocentric epistemology that arises from the prioritisation of individualism, industrialisation and production as core pillars of Eurocentric cultures; in this context, individuals with disabilities are marginalised and considered weak because of their inability to contribute to the priority areas of those societies (Barclay 2017). Thus, fear of disability stems from ableist ideologies, power relations and societal hierarchical norms that link disability to failure and frame persons with disabilities as inferior and threats to societal order. They are seen as incapable of exercising power and control over non-disabled individuals (Babik & Gardner 2021; Barclay 2017). This Eurocentric episteme on disability is contrasted by the spiritual worldviews of many African cultures, such as believing in life after death, reincarnation, where the spirits of dead people return to their communities, and the existence of a metaphysical world where spirits, ancestors and gods live (Barclay 2017). Barclay elucidates that the human body is not always the primary basis for social identity in most African cultures, but its spiritual and communal aspects hold greater significance. This belief of Africans, transmitted through their culture, dictates the complex nature of interactions that ensue between persons with disabilities and non-disabled persons in communities.

Fear can also arise from teachers’ inability to meet the needs of learners owing to individual and institutional constraints. For example, persistent challenges stemming from inadequate schooling resources and negative cultural perceptions of disability and the schooling of learners with disabilities can psychologically promote and justify substandard pedagogical practices for learners with disabilities on the surface of things but create contradictions in teachers’ psychological processes beneath the surface. Another example relates to the introduction of new schooling and pedagogical tools, such as inclusive education and preschool curriculum, into unreformed schooling systems that potentially change the system of activity within schooling contexts (see Engeström 2000, 2011). In the literature, we identified three contradictions, presented in Figure 1, that tend to shape teachers’ psychological processes: (1) teachers’ professional beliefs about disability versus their culturally mediated beliefs towards disability (Agbenyega 2003, 2006; Naami & Mort 2023), (2) inadequate teaching and learning materials and learner support systems versus demands for specialised pedagogical practices for learners with disabilities (Alhassan & Abosi 2017; Opoku et al. 2017) and (3) teachers’ traditional pedagogies designed to segregate regular learners from those with special needs versus demands for holistic pedagogy for all learners, regardless of their condition and social situation (Akongyam et al. 2023; Akyeampong 2017).

These contradictions appear on one side as barriers that potentially generate fear about implementing inclusive education. But, most importantly, they also appear as concepts that can be transformed into tools for uncovering and intervening in cultural artefacts in teachers’ psychological processes that are harmful to the learning and development of learners with disabilities.

While Ghana occupies a relatively small landmass in the Western part of Africa, it has over 80 languages and ethnic groups (Anson-Yevu 1988). Similar to other African cultures, the spectrum of tolerance for disability across ethnic groups in Ghana has historically ranged from veneration to ethnic cleansing. For example, the past attitudes of the Ga people of Accra, the southern part of Ghana, varied from pampering to reverence, reflecting a belief in the supernatural essence of people with disabilities (Kissi 2020). Consequently, the actions towards such people in these communities were seen to be less harsh. In other cultures, children with severe disabilities were either ostracised at birth or restricted to the confines of their family houses. They were denied access to communal activities, while older ones were excluded from leadership positions in communities, as evidenced by the de-stooling of chiefs who became severely ill (Allotey & Reidpath 2001; Azumi et al. 2018; Denham et al. 2010; Kissi 2020). Within these communities, children with disabilities were perceived as spirits who enter the world, live short lives and bring misfortunes and shame to families and communities before returning to the spirit world (Allotey & Reidpath 2001; Azumi et al. 2018; Denham et al. 2010). Although the practice is considered barbaric in the post-modern era, Allotey and Reidpath (2001) and Denham et al. (2010) argue that the practice of killing spirit children, and its associated discourses, do not constitute significant community infanticide since the verbal autopsies do not provide accurate evidence of the practice in its signification to the survival of communities.

The seemingly contradictory discourses across Ghana on disability, from veneration to carnage, emerge from their connections to and notions about the influences of the other (spirit) world in their material worlds. These discourses demonstrate how specific connections to the unseen world are translated into communal norms and interpreted to guide attitudes and behaviour towards persons with disabilities, reinforcing an assertion that communities’ beliefs and practices are subject to their unique experiences. More importantly, the discourses provide a means to unravel hidden artefacts in people’s psychological processes regarding disability and the development of children with disabilities. These psychological processes are shaped by their particular cultural context. The particular histories and practices of communities towards disability in Ghana have shaped how individuals construct and act on disability. The transmission of psychological processes from the collective to the individual within communities is elucidated in Vygotsky (1978).

Vygotsky elucidated that the development of specific human psychological processes is predicated on the nature of artefacts embedded in the social-communicative practices of communities. Within the context of disability, cultural beliefs and practices are often transmitted as psychological artefacts to inform community members’ actions towards disability and the schooling of learners with disabilities. In this line of reasoning, Kozulin (2003) writes, ‘Psychological tools are symbolic artefacts that, when internalised, help individuals master their functions of perception, memory, attention, and volition’ (Kozulin 2003:15–16). Kozulin links the development of psychological processes to symbolic concepts embedded in community activities and contexts that inform an individual’s behaviour when internalised. In essence, the discourses surrounding disability in communities shape the institutionalisation of disability and the psychological processes of social actors towards disability.

The paper is inspired by Vygotsky’s (1978) concept of ‘theory-methods’. The concept is premised on the view of the method as both process and product, which addresses the problem of how to understand teachers’ meanings as something that can never be accessed directly, owing to the specific nature of psychological processes and the contingency of cultural and historical processes. As a result, both the process and product characteristics of the method require the ingenuity of the researchers, including their indispensable grounding on relevant theoretical and methodological advances in the field. We systematically explored the psychological processes of teachers using appropriate culturally sensitive tools, such as fireside conversational group discussions, to understand and uncover hidden disability discourses within the cultural context in which they occur. We finally applied the principle of double stimulation (Sannino 2015) as a process and product of investigating and intervening in culturally derived constraints on learning and development.

The data used for this paper were pulled from a qualitative, cross-sectional doctoral study that was conducted in Ghana. The original study focused on the narratives of kindergarten teachers in a dynamic community undergoing rapid development. The community was rapidly developing from a predominantly rural to an urban settlement for working-class populations. It was therefore deemed sustainable to explore the regularities of cultural beliefs about disability in its schooling, which was also rapidly changing in its approach and scope to integrate inclusion. The study further focused on early childhood education because it is deemed to be the entry point for all children and thus presents a strong case for providing interventions that remove barriers to learning in children (Sims & Brettig 2018).

The approach to uncovering regularities of the pedagogy was systematic and culturally sensitive. Vygotsky’s cultural-historical activity theory provided a framework, through the principle of double stimulation, as a process and product of investigating and intervening culturally derived constraints in learning and development, such as the fear of disability. In this line of reasoning, Muthivhi (2011:32) elucidates that ‘cultural concepts in psychological processes should be linked to the specific cultural context of their manifestations’. This is important for understanding and analysing the complexity of the cultural processes of schooling and pedagogy, and given that culturally derived constraints to the pedagogy of learners with disabilities are often hidden in psychological processes and cannot be directly observed, a culturally sensitive approach to uncovering, and possibly intervening in, these cultural phenomena was recommended.

Focus group discussions were used to gather data for the study. These comprised 18 teachers from seven public schools in communities of the Ga-East Municipality of Accra, Ghana. These communities developed rapidly from predominantly rural into peri-urban settlements and therefore provide the case for investigating the inner psychological processes of teachers about disability discourses and schooling alongside the rapidly changing contexts of the communities. The focus groups were structured to mimic community fireside group conversations and storytelling, where adults gather after a day’s work to engage with one another and discuss matters of importance to them. This approach was utilised in Luria’s (1976:21–22) research expedition to Uzbekistan in 1929 and narrated by Proctor (2013) as follows:

Luria’s cultural research methods contrasted with those of Koffka, who accompanied him. Koffka conducted his research using a positivist approach associated with standardised testing (Proctor 2013):

Luria’s work proved that the methods of research into people’s psychological processes must be culturally sensitive. In the present study, we were sensitive to the resistance that the ‘gatekeeping’ officials posed to our request to conduct the study in their schools. The officials indicated that we could not observe the teachers and the children with disabilities directly in their classrooms. We initially suspected that the teachers could not fully express themselves when we engaged within school hours and at their schools. This was because they were overwhelmed with large classes and activities that made it difficult for us to engage. But more importantly, we inferred that they feared being punished for sharing information that was deemed to be sensitive regarding how the inclusive education policy was implemented. Our suspicion stemmed from the approval conditions given that we could not observe the learners with disabilities or developmental challenges in their classrooms and that the teachers were not inclusive education teachers. One of the teachers initially declined when we asked to record our conversations with her, citing that her boss had warned her not to speak with journalists and get into trouble. For this reason, we revised our method of investigation. We employed concepts of belongingness and communal conversations, such as patience, caring, solidarity and unity of common purpose, to foster a sense of community and trust with the hope that veiled issues in community and schooling practices would be brought to the fore and discussed.

We then decided to proceed with the study by engaging the teachers in group discussions outside their schools on weekends. We initially sought the teachers’ consent before inviting them to the group discussions. We then asked for their consent at each stage of the discussions. We understood that hidden psychological processes regarding disability could be subjective and reflect individualised cultural and political views that might not reflect the views and actions of the broader community of teachers (Ratner 1997). Ratner argues that these subjective psychological processes must be subjected to a systematic, objective analysis to validate them as those emerging from the broader social group or macro-level. To avoid projecting individualistic political views as postulates of culture and social behaviour towards disability and learners with disabilities, as Ratner warns, we employed focus group discussions as an interviewing method and an embodiment of interdependence where concepts and experiences were validated by the group: those individual views that were validated by the group were considered ‘immature’. However, we followed up with individual teacher interviews to understand and clarify their contextual meanings.

The initial set of questions we had prepared based on the theoretical concepts advanced through CHAT and the literature on disability discourse in Ghana paved the way for more in-depth group discussions. It helped the participants to relax, as at that point they began to have a fair idea of the study’s focus. For the second phase of the discussions, the participants were split into two groups and engaged in separate rooms using probing questions and statements that we had gathered from the first session. This was done to ensure that each teacher contributed to the discussions. We succeeded with this approach as the teachers felt at ease and expressed their views and experiences with learners with disabilities in their classrooms in a manner that exposed their collective views on disability and its manifestation in schooling. This culturally sensitive approach reflects van der Veer’s (2007) commentary on the Vygotsky-Luria data-gathering tradition:

This approach proved to be successful and provided affordances to explore the teachers’ psychological processes on disability and the schooling of learners with disabilities. We could not have achieved this feat if we had used positivistic standardised tests, which, according to Vygotsky (1978:85), only reveal the actual developed mental abilities and their functioning but neglect the iterative points of maturation in psychological processes and, at the same time, the opportunities to expose and intervene regarding concepts that are forming and yet to mature. Thus, a more rigorous approach that was theoretically situated and contextually relevant was required, bearing in mind that hidden psychological processes regarding disability could not be uncovered directly using formalist positivist methods and tools. Hence, the investigation followed a systematic, objective process of uncovering the histories and experiences of the teachers regarding disability and its manifestations in the pedagogy of children with disability. At the same time, it served as a means of analysing and interpreting the experiences within a particular cultural context of disability and schooling, constituting the product of the entire investigation. Akin to this is Vygotsky’s concept of double stimulation (Sannino 2015).

The notion of double stimulation has been advanced as a method, theory method and principle of cultural-historical activity theory to indirectly trace inner psychological processes using artificial tools of investigation (Muthivhi 2011; Sannino 2015). To Sannino (2015), there are:

This was important for our present study as we sought to understand how cultural narratives and practices on disability shape teachers’ psychological processes and their actions towards learners with disabilities.

We used structured questions and probing in social groups as interviewing tools to help the participants situate and make meaning of negative discourses on disability as a problematic social situation of learning and development of learners with disabilities (Blunden 2021:9–10; Vygotsky 1993). We followed up participants’ responses with probing questions that, by answering them, revealed their inner psychological processes and motives regarding disability and their relationships to broader social norms. We continued until the teachers began to question those motives and, at the same time, make suggestions on what they could do about the problematic situation. This method of double stimulation was deemed appropriate for revealing hidden motives and contradictions in pedagogical practices that could not be observed through a direct means of inquiry (Vygotsky 1978):

To Muthivhi (2011), these artificial tools or second stimuli can meaningfully reveal psychological processes when they are culturally sensitive and informed by the theory that undergirds the research enterprise. We incorporated this understanding into the gathering and interpreting of the data beyond the direct observation of predefined variables and concepts. The data collection method was not merely seen as a systematic application of principles and techniques but as an evolving means of inquisition and reflection informed by the theoretical framework (Radford & Sabena 2015). With this understanding, tenets in the teachers’ narratives were reconstructed during and after interviews and presented as vignettes or short case stories (Mayisela 2017). This was done to assist the teachers to reflect on their practices and to ‘artificially provoke a process of psychological development’ in their cultural, material and historical perceptions about disability and schooling of learners with disabilities (Vygotsky 1978:61). The data analysis was process oriented and formed part of the data collection process as it involved continuously generating, interpreting and validating themes with the teachers as a social group.

The method of thematic analysis was used to analyse and present relevant data for the paper. Table 1 provides themes and excerpts of the narratives provided by the teachers that were used for the analysis.

Before the study, the first author applied for ethical clearance from the Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Education at the University of Pretoria (EDU181/21). Further approval was sought in Ghana from the Ga-East District Office of the Ghana Education Service (GES/GEM/3/16/151) and the Headteachers of seven public kindergarten schools in the Ga-East District. All the teachers gave their consent to participate in the study after the first author had discussed the scope of the research and its implications with them. Subsequently, consent was sought at each preceding stage of the data collection process to ensure that the teachers were not coerced into providing sensitive information about their engagements with children with disabilities.

Eighteen kindergarten teachers from seven public kindergartens in the Ga-East Municipal in the Greater Accra Region of Ghana participated in the study. The mean age of the teachers was 35 years (ranging from 27 to 50). On average, the teachers had been teaching at the kindergarten (KG) level for 6 years. Three teachers were trained in early childhood education, while the remaining 15 were trained in general basic education. At the time of the study, none of the teachers had been formally trained or received special or inclusive education certification. However, they had attended some workshops on the implementation of inclusive education. Sixteen out of the 18 teachers had taught previously at the basic education level (Primary 1–Junior High School 3). The average years of teaching experience of the teachers was 13 (the minimum was 4 years and the maximum was 30 years).

All the kindergarten teachers were female. This was not surprising, as early childhood education as a profession – owing to its caring and nurturing aspects – is dominated by female teachers (Mashiya 2014). Mashiya argues that the underrepresentation of male teachers in early childhood education is derived from culturally assigned gender roles in communities that construct and mediate early childhood education as a women’s profession. This perception is framed within a cross-cultural notion of masculinity and feminism, which prescribe gender ideologies and expectations. Only three of the participants were trained in early childhood education. The reason for having few trained early childhood teachers could be a result of the late introduction of early childhood education as a standalone programme in teacher training colleges and other tertiary institutions (Frimpong 2020). Further, two of the teachers had been demoted from higher levels to preschool or kindergarten level as punishment for misconduct. Fifteen out of the 18 teachers were basic education teachers who sought transfer from their former schools and had to settle for kindergarten because there were limited vacancies at the basic education level.

Fear of disability manifested when the teachers encountered learners with disabilities, particularly those with more pronounced disabilities, in their classrooms. They feared the children with disabilities would attack them or put saliva on them. The fear associated with learners with disabilities derives from culturally preserved discourses on disability in the teachers’ psychological processes. The fear was thus more evident when there was a risk that a pregnant woman would come into contact with a learner with disability. Consequently, the teachers maintained a distance from learners with more pronounced disabilities. More importantly, fear of disability appeared to be hidden in the teachers’ beliefs about disability, resulting in the teachers keeping a distance or completely avoiding any physical contact with learners with disabilities in their classrooms.

The teachers justified their actions towards people with disabilities using culturally mediated notions of disability. Hence, their proscriptions of disability as burdensome and contagious stem from their communities’ discourses on disability that perhaps have been preserved through a culture of fear of disability. The reasons given by the teachers differed phenotypically from those documented about the practices of communities of the Kasena-Nankana District in Ghana. However, their genetic structures remain unchanged, highlighting a discourse that disregards established social norms about disability and attracts punishments. For example, the Kasena-Nankana communities focused on sexual taboos and violation of social norms as conditions for attracting children with disabilities as punishments from the spirit world (Allotey & Reidpath 2001; Azumi et al. 2018; Denham et al. 2010). Similarly, the teachers’ beliefs align with historically preserved disability discourse that forbids pregnant women from engaging with children with disabilities for fear of attracting misfortunes to their families and reproducing spirit children. Nonetheless, the strongly-held beliefs about disability were changing as they emerged in a teacher’s narrative that she no longer believes in the dominant myths about disability. This assertion provides critical psychological artefacts for transforming beliefs and behaviour towards children with disabilities and their schooling.

Within schools, teachers’ psychological processes towards disability remained culture dependent, as observed in the present study, where teachers were engaged in a fireside conversational setting to understand their beliefs and discourses on disability and the nature of pedagogy enacted for students with disabilities and developmental delays. Thus, fear appears to drive negative attitudes in teachers towards disability, such as disability distancing, learner neglect and excessive use of corporal punishment. In this line of reasoning, fear of disability appears to have consequences for interactions between the teacher and her learner(s) with disabilities in the classroom. Thus, fear of disability mediates teachers’ psychological processes regarding culturally acceptable norms about disability and disability engagements. For example, narratives from the teachers in the present study show that they maintained a distance from learners with visible impairments such as drooling (ptyalism), seizures or hyperactivity for fear of giving birth to children with similar conditions or being attacked by those with more aggressive behaviour.

More so, teachers’ motive for eliciting specific attitudes and practices in their engagements derives from a culture of fear that projects disability as contagious, burdensome and a purveyor of misfortune (Allotey & Reidpath 2001; Azumi et al. 2018; Denham et al. 2010). The teachers act out their fear by distancing themselves or using corporal punishment in their instruction. Corporal punishment refers to the use of physical force, such as caning, pinching, slapping and hitting, with the motive to cause physical pain, not injury, to correct or control a child’s behaviour. Although corporal punishment is seen as a cultural tool for child discipline across Africa, emerging evidence suggests that it is a strong risk factor associated with multiple poor outcomes for young children (Dickson et al. 2024). Consequently, the learners internalise the teacher’s actions by becoming disinterested in classroom activities.

Fear underpins and guides the ‘type of social relations, attitudes, and behaviour that ought to exist between individuals who live together in a community’ (Gyekye 1996:35–36). Similarly, fear shapes teachers’ roles in preserving culturally sanctioned norms about disability and what could happen to them if they behaved otherwise. In this case, the fear of disability defines the particular social situation of learning and development that arises when a teacher engages learners with disabilities by altering the learners’ relationship with the world and their interactions with others (Vygotsky 1983:102). Accordingly, Gindis (1995) elucidates that what ensues tends to limit opportunities for the learners to engage with instruction beyond concrete concepts, the nature of assistance accessible and ultimately, impede their learning and development.

In essence, teachers’ fear surrounding disability structures the social situation of learners with disabilities, setting a glass ceiling on the educational experiences of learners with disabilities. Thus, the fear of disability, as a culturally mediated artefact in teachers’ psychological processes regarding disability, has consequences for the nature of pedagogical practices and interactions that teachers enact for learners with disabilities. The analysis shows complex interactions between the genetic mediation of fear of disability in the social situation of learners with disabilities within schooling. When fear is internalised, it creates resistance to learning in the learner. The notion of externalisation/internalisation of fear of disability and its linkage to learning resistance is elucidated in Arievitch and Stetsenko (2000) using the ideas of Gal’perin and Vygotsky. Arievitch and Stetsenko examined the relationships between specific instructional tools and cognitive development. The authors alluded to the notion that school instruction provides critical culturally evolving tools that, when internalised, mediate the learning process and shape cognition. Accordingly, the present study argues that the instructional environment created through teachers’ action of distancing and the use of corporal punishment resulting from their internalised fear of disability can transform and develop resistance to learning in the learner. Furthermore, the findings demonstrate that a poorly delivered learning environment induced by negative teacher cultural factors provides little or no transformative cognitive tools to learners with disability.

Resistance to learning arises when there is a clash between conflicts internalised by the learner in the classroom and their communities, resulting from their impairments. Gindis (1995) elucidated Vygotsky’s idea of the social construction of disabilities as a primary barrier to access and participation of learners with disabilities. He argues that impairment is not subjectively perceived as a defect and deviance until it appears and is transmitted as such in the social world. Culturally mediated perception emerges in beliefs about disability. It alters the learner’s ability to interact naturally in the world and with people, creating conflicts in the learner, ‘those conflicts which arise for such a child upon entering the world’ (Vygotsky 1993:102), cited in Gindis (1995). When such conflicts are resolved, the learners will be ready to learn new things presented to them. In our case, negative attitudes towards the learners further deepened the conflicts and created resistance to learning. When learning is blocked in this way, it is argued that the teacher has reached their potential in mediating learning and requires support (Gindis 1995). Thus, resistance to learning can emerge as a contradictory motive to teachers’ culturally mediated beliefs about disabilities and negative practices towards learners with disabilities in their classrooms.

The findings further suggest that teachers’ strong-held beliefs about disability and children with disabilities were changing. The changing behaviour of the teachers was informed by her belief in God and the aftermath of her encounter with a learner with disability when she was pregnant. The changes were not widespread, but they demonstrated developments in teachers’ psychological processes regarding disabilities; these seemingly subtle changes present contradictory contexts for transforming the pedagogy of learners with disabilities. More specifically, the emergence of a conflicting belief system to those of the dominant culture regarding disability provides critical opportunities for intervening in the psychological processes of teachers towards disability and the pedagogy for learners with disabilities in mainstream classrooms.

The opportunities to transform the social and learning conditions of learners with disabilities can be leveraged through specialised teacher training programmes (pre-service and in-service training). The evidence of strongly held beliefs about disability and negative practices towards learners with disabilities reveals a lack of adequate training in inclusive education for teachers. As outlined earlier, none of the teachers were trained in inclusive education. With little or no training to expose and deal with culturally mediated notions about disability, the fear of disability seems to have mediated teacher–learner interactions and, as a result, forced the teachers to distance themselves from the learners and provided little learning support to them in their classrooms. Therefore, providing specialised training for teachers in inclusive education to create safe spaces and engage the teachers to reflect, discuss and seek contextually relevant ways to transform their beliefs and perceptions about disability and the learning development of children with disabilities is required.

The article emphasises the importance of specialised in-service training that encourages teachers to critically reflect on the limitations of their culturally mediated beliefs and practices. Concurrently, this in-service training should help teachers develop culturally sensitive and developmentally appropriate psychological and material tools to overcome the limitations of fear associated with disability. This could enhance quality, inclusive learning opportunities for learners with disabilities in their classrooms.

Furthermore, fostering an environment that equips teachers with critical tools to enhance their pedagogical practices is critical to counter the transference of fear of disability. Professional development should focus on effective teaching strategies and emphasise the necessity for transformative ideologies on disability. Such an approach has the potential to empower teachers to engage more effectively with learners, adapting their instructional methods to be more inclusive and responsive to the distinct needs of students. This discourse encompasses re-evaluating teachers’ in-service and pre-service programmes, integrating principles of inclusive education at all academic levels and actively involving teachers in dialogues surrounding disability and learning. By expanding our framework to include not only learners but also teachers and the systemic structures that entrap them, we can pave the way for more equitable and enriching pedagogical environments for learners with disabilities.