In this course, we will explore the strong link between sustainability, social justice, and special education. This link exists because a common approach to guiding social policy and education is instrumentalism. Instrumentalism assumes that there is a vast separation between humans and nature, or between certain kinds of humans and other kinds of humans and it can lead to policy, legislation, and associated interventions that ignore the environment and/or discriminate against certain people. However, there are alternatives to the instrumentalist approach, such as the ‘ecological model’, which emphasise the connectedness of humans to the environment and to each other and which aim to create healthy environments and societies in which people of all types, abilities and backgrounds can thrive. In this course, you will learn how to work towards creating healthy social and environment contexts in which people of all types, abilities and backgrounds can thrive. This course invites the students to reflect more in depth on how the interplay between the individual and their surroundings influence the lives of disabled people.

• Disability and gender, class and ethnicity (intersectional perspectives)
• Indigenist models and perspectives
• Individual versus collective responsibility
• Diversity as strength as well as strength-based, inclusive, sustainable special education as a concept