Special Educational Needs (with Foundation Year)

The Foundation Year is a great opportunity if you have the ability and enthusiasm to study for a degree, but do not yet have the qualifications required to enter directly onto our degree programmes. A significant part of the Foundation Year focuses upon core skills such as academic writing at HE level, becoming an independent learner, structuring academic work, critical thinking, time management and note taking.

Successful completion of the Foundation Year will enable you to progress into the first year (Level C) of your chosen honours degree. Further details can be found here.

The first year of your special educational needs course provides knowledge and understanding of the key ideas in Disability Studies that you will bring to your study of special educational needs. You will study the following modules:

Understanding Disability: Activism, Rights and Inclusion

This module develops your understanding of the relationship between disability and society and the different ways it has been understood over time. It includes an 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.

You will explore disability in early years, youth, adulthood, later life, and old age. This deepens your understanding of the relationship between disability and education throughout the life course. While examining 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.

Re-thinking Special Education: Culture, Identity and Society

This central focus of your first-year special educational needs course relates to the ways disability is represented in culture. It addresses important ideas about how social attitudes towards disability can be challenged or reinforced through, for example, media representations, and it explores the relationship between pity, charity, and disability.

You will investigate the specific experiences of disability and special educational needs in greater depth, challenging the idea of disabled people as a homogeneous group. This includes examining factors that may shape an individual’s experience of disability or special educational needs, such as socioeconomic status, gender, class, and sexuality.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

You will explore a range of ideas that connect theory to inclusive practice. Key areas of study include cultural inclusion, inclusion and inclusive education, inclusive and exclusive policy, transformability, Universal Design, and Universal Design for Learning.

This final theme provides important insights into the relationship between special educational needs, disability, and ethics. Topics include disability ethics and technology, the ethics of intervention such as medical intervention, and the ethics of choice.

Dissertation Phase

Alongside this course of study, you will select an aspect of research related to special educational needs and develop an independent dissertation project in your chosen area.