Leveraging Indigenous Wisdom to Foster Inclusive Learning for Students with Disabilities: The Role of Storytelling in African School Contexts

This conceptual paper develops a Universal Design for Learning (UDL)-aligned framework for disability-inclusive education that treats Indigenous and locally rooted African storytelling traditions as context-dependent pedagogical and epistemic resources rather than as a single pan-African practice. The aim is to explain how culturally grounded storytelling, when co-designed with learners, families, disabled people’s organizations, cultural knowledge holders, and educators, may support access, participation, identity affirmation, and belonging. The paper uses a theory-guided conceptual synthesis; it is non-empirical and involved no participants or study site. It integrates Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS), decolonizing and culturally sustaining pedagogy, critical disability perspectives, social inclusion, and the CAST UDL Guidelines 3.0. The resulting logic model distinguishes inputs and design principles from mediators, proximal and distal outcomes, contextual moderators, and ethical implementation requirements. A barrier-based storytelling toolkit and five testable propositions translate the model into researchable hypotheses while treating disability labels as insufficient guides to learner needs. The framework is intended as a flexible heuristic for diverse African educational settings, not a continent-wide prescription, and it requires critical review of narratives that may reproduce ableist, gendered, linguistic, ethnic, or other exclusions.