South Africa is a second-generation adopter of inclusive education, and eagerly responded to the vision of inclusive education set out in the Salamanca Statement of 1994. Various policy and legislative initiatives call for inclusion against the backdrop of systemic exclusion during apartheid and colonial years. However, despite the development of policy mandates calling for South African schools to become inclusionary, traction around these objectives has been slow in most cases. Many Global North countries integrated the inclusion agenda into already well-functioning education systems, where quality education was generally available to most. South Africa, as with many countries in the global south, comes to inclusion not after the establishment of a generally well-functioning system, inclusion comes concurrently with the need to build such a system after the ravages of colonialism and in the face of global economic competitiveness and inequality. What is apparent in the South African context is that the problems are complex, linked to path dependencies resulting from ‘historical sediments’ where the challenges to the implementation of inclusive education cannot be understood apart from colonial legacies and current global inequalities. Also, Inclusive education in South Africa must be seen as an issue that goes beyond disability inclusion and must address the range of reasons children and young people are excluded from educational success. Finally, micro-inclusions, that is, the small changes that teachers make to enable access and participation in learning, should become embedded into practice, and school leaders need to be encouraged to find ways in which inclusion becomes a criterion of excellence, rather than a threat to excellence. I propose that the conceptual ideas and tools inspired by Cultural Historical Activity Theory which include Engestrom’s Activity Systems Models and Change Laboratories and Knotworking for professional-teacher-development, together with Stetsenko’s Transformative Activist Stance and the ideas of the primary contradiction in capitalistic societies, could be of value to researchers in understanding the complexities and hidden motives that contribute to the difficulties of navigating the challenges of inclusion in South African schools.

To explore the extant research literature into the extent to which CHAT-inspired tools have been applied in school settings, I undertook a keyword search of the Scopus database between 2010 and 2024. The results were analysed through the VosViewer software to gain a perspective on the extent of the research in this field, the countries where the research activity is most prominent, the number of papers published, the extent of co-authorship and citations, and the keywords used in these papers. These findings from the bibliometric review illustrate that over a 13-year period, there is a growing interest in using CHAT concepts to examine contradictions in schools. It was also apparent that most of the research has been conducted in developed nations. From the Keyword Visualization Graphic, it is also evident that clusters of words around contemporary issues that include ‘teacher learning’, ‘contradiction’, and ‘expansive learning’ emerge across various research articles. This indicates that there is interest in researching schools as complex systems using CHAT-inspired concepts and tools, and the challenges they face with contradictions.

Keywords: Cultural Historical Activity Theory, pedagogical responsiveness, inclusive education, bibliometric, primary contradiction.