Libraries at University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Date of this Version
8-2021
Abstract
This paper attempts to establish ways in which school libraries can be used to achieve quality inclusive education in a recessed economy. Inclusive education is a process of enhancing the capacity of the education system in any country to reach out to diverse learners, irrespective of their status, character or disabilities, while economic recession is a period of decline in economic activities of a country. This paper emphasized that school library has a vital role to play in the inclusive education programme. School libraries should help disabled people to obtain special reading materials so as to integrate them into the mainstream society and removing the barriers which exclude disabled people from getting adequate and effective information service from the library. The paper further looked at effect of economic recession on school library development and quality inclusive education in Nigeria. The paper identified challenges of school library toward providing inclusive services to people with disability such as lack of skilled manpower, lack of properly trained personnel and poor funding. The way forward to ensure quality inclusive education in a recessed economy were for school library to prepare ahead of time so as to avoid problem in developing school library for quality inclusive education in Nigeria and also ensures disabled people have unrestricted access to life changing information they need to participate actively in the larger society. It was concluded that school library should run an inclusive library system to ensure disabled students, were not left out of quality education programme of the government. Keywords: Inclusive education, School library, Economic recession, Special needs people, Disabilities.