FdA Professional Practice in Special Educational Needs & Disability (Grantham)

This module will introduce you to a range of social, emotional and well-being difficulties that might impact upon individuals at different stages of their learning journey.

The module investigates risks to learners’ psychological health and wellbeing and examines strategies for identification and support. The module emphasises the need for practitioners to develop a reflective understanding of the nature of mental well-being and interventions that may be provided.

This module will challenge you to reflect critically on issues associated with social and emotional development, which can lead to mental health concerns. Topics might include, for example, attachment disorders, eating disorders, depression, anxiety, and/or post-traumatic stress. The module explores causes of mental health problems e.g., neurological and or environmental effects.

The assessment tasks will require you to demonstrate your knowledge and understanding of the module’s core concepts, in relation to practice, thus developing the application of newly acquired learning to practical situations.

This module enables you to focus closely on your own day-to-day practice. It is tailored to your professional contexts and enables you to align your academic study to your own specialism, interest, or career ambitions, through a work-based project. You will select a category of need as appropriate to your own professional practice. You will carry out a detailed investigation of the surrounding social and political contexts, support structures and evidence-based approaches to pedagogy, teaching, learning and assessment for this category of need. This is likely to involve challenging popular assumptions surrounding the category of need, with reference to robust sources.

Teaching and learning on this module provides a framework for you to conduct your own project to investigate and develop interventions and support strategies that can be applied and evaluated in professional practice. The module content will exemplify the interrogation of rhetoric and reality in SEND, model the sourcing of appropriate literature, and provide a starting point for you to extend your own reading, knowledge and understanding in a chosen category of need. The module considers the nature of intervention strategies and their application within surrounding curriculum frameworks, as appropriate.

The project will challenge you to plan, design, implement and evaluate resources and strategies to support learning and to reflect critically on the practitioner role in meeting learners’ needs in the SEND setting.

The assessment tasks enable you to demonstrate their acquired knowledge and apply it to their professional practice, through a series of tasks which stretch and showcase your developing academic and professional skills appropriately, at level 5.

This module takes a global perspective and challenges you to consider approaches to SEND in international contexts. The content will re-visit international frameworks for SEND and inclusion introduced in PPSN40323 Understanding the policy and practice of SEND and inclusion and offer examples of international policy and practice in SEND. You will be asked to compare and contrast a range of international examples and to analyse and critically evaluate these in the context of established theories and principles of education, equality and inclusivity.

The module stimulates critical thinking and encourages you to engage with key questions and debates that occur nationally, internationally and globally, in the field of SEND.

The assessment tasks target graduate attributes and academic skills development in information literacy, critical thinking and global citizenship, as well as stretching students’ broader knowledge of SEND and inclusion as global phenomena.

This module introduces you to research as an aspect of your academic development and professional practice and offers an opportunity for you to extend and demonstrate your knowledge and understanding in a specific aspect of SEND practice. Teaching and learning is delivered through a combination of whole group lectures, small group and independent work, supported by in-person and/or online tutorials. The VLE will be an integral part of the teaching and learning in this module, providing resources and signposting relevant reading and suggested study tasks. This balanced combination of classroom-based teaching with independent study provides a basis for more independent study at level 6. The module content provides you with a knowledge base from which you might begin to engage with appropriately authorised and supervised practitioner research, in your workplace setting.

The module content explores the principles of practitioner research and the ways in which it can be used to inform day-to-day practice. You will also consider how you might investigate your own emerging questions further, through practitioner research. This will include an introduction to primary and secondary data sources and approaches to analysis.

The module content enables you to begin to engage with research design, for example, research questions, different research paradigms, approaches, tools and techniques. The module content emphasises ethical principles such as consent, working with gatekeepers, confidentiality/anonymity, and appropriate handling of data. It will begin to explore approaches to analysis.

The assessment tasks for this module provide an opportunity for you to practice emerging research skills, for example conducting your own literature review, formulating a research question, selecting appropriate tools, designing a research project, and demonstrating ethical awareness, for example through a research proposal.