Special Educational Needs

The first year provides you with a knowledge and understanding of the key ideas in Disability Studies that you will bring to your study of Special Educational Needs.  You will study:

Disability and History

This will enable you to develop an understanding of the relationship between disability and society and the different ways that this has been understood over time. It includes a brief overview of early historical representations of disability but focuses most significantly on the emergence of categorisation and institutions in the nineteenth century as a basis for understanding contemporary ideas about Special Educational Needs.

Disability and the Life Course

This aspect of the course will encourage you to explore disability in early years, disability and youth, adulthood and in later life and old age. This will deepen your understanding of the relationship between disability, and education throughout the life course.

Disability and Culture

This key focus in your first-year course relates to the ways that disability is represented in culture. This addresses important ideas regarding the ways social attitudes towards disability can be challenged or reinforced through, for example, media representations and opens up important ideas about the relationship between pity, charity and disability.

Disability and Society

You will develop an understanding of the relationship between disability and social practices which significantly shape the everyday experiences of disabled people and the ways in which we think about SEN and disability. Themes include normalcy, language and terminology, charity and pity. You will also study contemporary understandings of intersectionality, considering the relationship between class, race, gender, sexuality and disability.

Diverse Experiences

You will explore the specificity of experiences of disability and SEN in greater depth, challenging the notion of disabled people as a homogeneous group. This includes exploring factors that might transform an individual’s experience of disability or SEN, such as socioeconomic status, gender, class, and sexuality. While you will explore issues such as stigma and prejudice (for example in relation to psychiatric labels such as Borderline Personality Disorder), you will also consider the work of disability activists and academics, disability as a minority identity and notions of disability pride.

Social Theory of Disability

The second year of your course is underpinned by the social model of disability. You will develop an understanding of the significance of this in terms of theory and practice in relation to Special Educational Needs. You will engage with recent and relevant research that models the application of the social model as a conceptual and practical tool for change.

Exploring Diversity, Disability and Education

You will engage with recent research that offers alternative readings of impairment such as work on neurodiversity, dyslexia and lexism, as well as sensory, bodily and cognitive diversity. You will be encouraged to develop independent research to support your choice for a focused study.

Exploring Professional Values and Attitudes

The relationship between embodied and professional knowledge forms an important core for this section of the course. The ethics of professional practice will be explored with reference to a range of educational contexts and professional roles and practice-based research. You will also have an opportunity to enhance your knowledge and awareness of issues relating to ethics of practice and to gain knowledge about future employment opportunities.

Researching Disability

This final element of your studies engages with ethical and philosophical as well as practical dimensions of researching disability. You will study the importance of lived and embodied experience and methods and approaches for emancipatory and participatory forms of research.

Theories of Disability

Your final year begins with a study of contemporary work in disability studies and includes a study of critical disability theory, ableism/disablism neo-liberal ableism, knowledge and power and the subject, disability and surveillance, race and ableism, the Tripartite model, appreciation and affirmation and crip theory.

Inclusive Practice

Here you will explore a range of ideas that enable you to take theory to a consideration of inclusive practice. The key work covered here relates to: cultural inclusion, inclusion and inclusive education, inclusive/exclusive policy, transformability, Universal Design and Universal Design for Learning.

Disability and Ethics

This final theme offers important insights into the relationship between disability and ethics including the following topics: disability ethics and technology, ethics of intervention including medical intervention and ethics of choice.

Dissertation Phase

In addition to this course of study, you will identify an aspect of study related to Special Educational Needs and develop a piece of independent research into your chosen area.
The following courses are indicative of the courses available to you as Advanced Research Courses.

Policy Analysis: Special Educational Needs, Inclusion and Disability

This course focuses specifically on special educational needs, inclusion and disability policy from the Warnock Report onwards. It critically examines key words and phrases as well as emphasising the problematic duality of policy imperatives. Through close reading of key policies, the ARC critically dissects historical and contemporary understandings and practices of SEND in England. The assessment for the module is an analysis of a small portion of the Children and Families Act 2014 utilising skills gained in the module sessions.

Researching the Cultural History of Learning Disability

In this cultural history of learning disability, the emphasis is not on what certain people are or are not learning, nor on what anyone’s particular difficulties with learning are perceived to be. Rather, the emphasis is on the role “learning disabilities” play in society. In other words, a cultural approach is concerned with the way people said to have learning disabilities have been conceptualized, spoken about, and interacted with, and with the relational and environmental factors contextualizing and shaping these practices. We will investigate the way intersecting discourses of medicine, education, media, law, economics, colonialism and eugenics brought the phenomenon of Learning Disability into being in the 19th Century, and continue to influence discourse in the present day.

Disablement & Time

Issues of accessibility, exclusion and disablement have traditionally been conceptualised and discussed in spatial terms. Here you will be explore temporal forms of disablement -- ways in which people can be disabled by the regulation and standardisation of time, and by the imposition of rigidly constructed social and institutional timeframes.

The sessions are underpinned by two theoretical approaches:

1) Chrononormativity – a normative approach to the regulatory value of imposing timeframes, resulting in various forms of disablement;

2) Arrhythmia – a component of Rhythmanalysis – a method devised by the French sociologist Henri Lefebvre to evaluate the forms of disablement that arise when the rhythms and time-related expectations imposed by an institution conflict with the preferred and natural rhythms of its inhabitants

Metanarratives of Disability and Assumed Authority

The inequity of the normative social order is profound. When out and about, many disabled people know only too well what it is to be erroneously told the error of their ways by passers-by, assumed authority often cloaked in helpfulness and accompanied by multiple variants of virtue signalling. Although support, assistance, and indeed helpfulness are all sometimes desired if not required, those things are distinct from assumed authority so widespread that it even extends into the workplace, home, and so on. This being so, benefiting from the knowledge of a colleague becomes a matter of inclusion; enjoying the company of a friend becomes complicated by notions of duty; and sexual attraction becomes haunted by the spectre of charity. All of these things are enforced by the metanarrative of disability that will be deconstructed in this research seminar.

Researching the representation of disability in popular culture

This seminar series explores the use of cultural disability studies theory, concepts and methods in research surrounding disability and popular culture. Students will develop in-depth knowledge of key issues relating to the portrayal of disability in various forms of popular culture (such as television, advertising, film and popular music) and ways of examining these issues within research. Students will learn about the role disability studies has in promoting critically informed responses to the representation of diversity in popular culture, and will explore connections between disability studies and cultural studies.

Exploring chronic illness, neurodiversity and mental health distress

This advanced research seminar will focus on exploring impairments that are not immediately visible and/or are often questioned by others. This includes chronic illnesses, neurodivergence and mental health distress. We will explore the barriers that people living with such impairments encounter in education, healthcare and employment. We will take an intersectional lens, recognising diverse experiences within these identities (such as race and LGBTQ). We will engage with key concepts such as crip time, epistemic injustice, subjugated knowledges and disability gain, among others. In the assessment, we will consider practical solutions for how to remove barriers for these people in education, healthcare or employment.

Disability and Disney

The aim of this research seminar is to explore and analyse representations of disability in Disney. You will study a range of disability representations featured in Disney, such as physical impairments, dwarfism, visual impairments and question whether representations are improving, or further reinforcing problematic stereotypes. You will engage with key writers in both Disability and Disney studies to provide a nuanced approach. In order to do this the course will draw on theories such as audience reception theory. Students will consider how these representations may inform society’s understanding of disability. It will also explore a range of research methods to support your analysis of representations.