Mapping Conceptualizations of Inclusive Education in Moroccan Academic Research (2020–2025): A Systematic Review

Abstract

Inclusive education is now a stated priority in Moroccan policy, most notably through the Loi-cadre 51.17 (2019), which commits the national education system to equity and inclusion. Less clear is how Moroccan researchers themselves define and study inclusion. This paper reviews 36 Moroccan peer-reviewed articles on inclusive education published between 2020 and 2025, drawn from a trilingual search (Arabic, French, and English) of Google Scholar and coded using Thomas and Harden's (2008) thematic synthesis method. Articles were classified against two models from the literature: a medical/deficit model, which treats inclusion as integrating diagnosed individuals into mainstream settings, and a social/rights-based model, which treats inclusion as removing systemic barriers for all learners. 39% of the corpus follows a medical/deficit framing, 25% a social/rights-based framing, and 33% mix the two, citing rights-based policy language while studying only narrowly defined disability populations. About three-quarters of the articles focus on students with diagnosed disabilities; linguistic minorities, gender, and poverty are barely studied. The results point to a gap between the language of national policy and what researchers actually study, and suggest that widening the populations studied may do more to shift the field than further theoretical argument.