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Overcoming barriers through resilience and purpose
CEHD’s new Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence shares his journey
New to campus is Thomas Timothy Mtonga, a Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence studying inclusive education for the 2025-26 academic year. Hailing from the Republic of Zambia in Southeast Africa, Mtonga is working with Department of Organizational Leadership, Policy, and Development Professor Christopher Johnstone to study the comparative implementation of inclusive education in different countries. He is also helping Johnstone teach a PhD class.
“Inclusive education has been advocated for as far back as the 1960s,” Mtonga says. “It is a system of education where you do not separate or segregate your learners. This form of education has been implemented differently in different countries. Therefore, as a pair, we would like to establish the causes for the differences, determine the similarities in the implementation of this inclusive education and explore the common practices which we should be able to advocate for.”
Thomas Timothy Mtonga
A personal connection to inclusive education
Inclusive education is dear to Mtonga as he lost his sight at the age of 10. “Because schools for the blind in Zambia are far and so distant, I stayed home for one year,” he says. “My father later took me to a school for the blind in a town called Ndola.”
Mtonga’s parents and extended family were immersed in the traditional myths and beliefs toward any disability. “Having me as a blind child was devastating,” he says. “It was actually embarrassing. I remember that some of my family members did not want to guide me by touching me.” Mtonga’s father later told him that certain people, including his siblings, were not ready to sight guide him because they believed that his condition was contagious.
When the school closed for the winter in 1982 for the holidays, a communication had gone to all parents to come and pick up their students. Mtonga found himself alone. “We were excited to see our family members,” he says. “But although my parents received the communication, they decided not to come and pick me up from school. I remained at school for three weeks of the holiday. Seeing that I was so lonely and always crying, the head teacher decided to take me to his home so that I could play with his children.”
When Mtonga’s father finally showed up nearly a month later, teachers were interested in finding out why his parents had taken so long to come pick him up. “My father was honest with the teachers. He told them that due to influence from family members, they did not want to have a blind child near them,” he says. “He confessed to me that he was very sorry for this treatment. As a family, they thought that the school would just take care of me.”
After speaking to the teachers, including one who was also blind, Mtonga’s father changed his attitude completely and stood up for him. “This change only affected my father,” he says. “The rest of my brothers were still living in denial and they stigmatized me.”
Although Mtonga’s primary school was for the blind, he and four other blind classmates needed to move to a secondary school to complete grades eight through 12 in 1988. “Much to our surprise, when the able-bodied learners realized that we were blind, they ran away and stood afar off,” he says. “The head teacher had to call three boys and two girls to escort us to the dormitories and he gave them strict instructions to take care of us.”
At his new school, Mtonga’s life was hard.
“As blind students, we were not allowed to eat with everyone in the dining hall for fear of spreading our condition to others,” he says. “Our fellow pupils were not ready to interact with us. Some teachers abandoned the classes that they were given to teach if they found us in that class.”
To make matters worse, there was no teacher who had knowledge on the management of learners with disabilities. “There was no one to raise awareness among teachers,” Mtonga says. “There were no braille reading materials and our future looked very bleak.”
Eventually, however, some pupils and teachers came forward with support. A trained special education teacher was brought to the school, which began changing the narration of Mtonga’s story.
“Though teaching and learning materials were still difficult to find, at least we were accepted by our fellow pupils and teachers,” he says. When it came time to write his junior secondary school examination in 1989, Mtonga emerged as one of the best pupils in the province. “This performance changed the perception of most of the teachers,” he says.
College and beyond
Mtonga finished his secondary school education in 1992 and went to train as a secondary school diploma teacher. “As a blind student, it was very difficult to manage the courses,” he says. “I was apparently the only blind student at the college.”
Three weeks into college, it became clear to Mtonga that his stay would be short lived. “There was no lecturer who knew braille, there were no braille materials for me to read from the library, and there was no equipment for writing material into braille,” he says.
Mtonga pleaded with the college chaplain to help him find a typewriter, with which he promised to learn in a few days. Within the same week, the Kabwe Rotary Club donated a typewriter. Mtonga’s friends taught him the keyboard, and he was able to use it for his assignments and exams.
“With this typewriter, I managed to score very good grades, and I graduated with an award of excellent performance at the college level,” he says.
After graduation, Mtonga was deployed as a teacher and in 2004, decided to upgrade himself. “I joined the University of Zambia as an undergraduate,” he says. “Upon completion of my bachelor’s degree, the University of Zambia senate was quite pleased with my performance. The university therefore employed me as a lecturer.”
Mtonga completed his master’s degree in special education, and later, won an award from UNESCO to complete a postgraduate diploma in curriculum design and development. In 2014, he was sponsored by the Open Society Foundation (OSF) to conduct a course in the sociology of globalization in Turkey. In the same year, he was sent to the University of Leeds sponsored by the same foundation to complete a master’s in international human rights law. “I graduated in 2016 and immediately started doing my doctorate,” he says. “I became the first blind man in Zambia to do a master’s and doctorate.”
Earlier this year, Mtonga received a Fulbright for his post-doctoral scholarship at CEHD. The Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence Program brings visiting scholars from abroad to colleges and universities in the United States, offering discipline-specific expertise to benefit their students, faculty, staff, and communities. Mtonga is one of 25 Fulbright Scholars-in-Residence who will teach and develop innovative courses in the United States during the 2025-26 academic year. Mtonga says it took high levels of resilience, determination, and intrinsic motivation to get where he is today, but he is just one of many. “There is a need to lift the millions of persons with disabilities out of the dungeons of oppression, poverty, educational ignorance, and social discrimination,” he says. “This requires consented efforts to raise sincere awareness among the people who are filled with myths and beliefs against persons with disabilities. It is also important for persons with disabilities themselves to ensure that they speak for themselves.”