O splocie problemów i badań pedagogiki specjalnej z refleksją metodologiczną, aksjologiczną i antropologiczną

Abstract

As a scientific discipline dealing with existentially painful and often cognitively unclear situations of human life, special education is practically oriented (as it is engaged in implementing the good of those who are the research object) and, therefore, requires even more intensive methodological, axiological and anthropological reflection, which should co-occur with its major subject matter. Moreover, this subject matter carries many new cognitively significant issues, which the reflection oriented in this way will be able to elicit, recognize and interpret. Some more detailed issues which are undertaken in the methodological, axiological and anthropological reflection can be indicated, e.g.: • methodological-semiotic studies on the key notions in special education; • axiological studies (within philosophy of values) on axiological experiencing by a disabled person or a person working with such a person; • anthropological studies (within philosophy of humanity) on understanding a person as a human being in the particular situation of severe and profound intellectual disability, when some defined features “normally” attributed to a human being are excluded. These issues as well as the research into them overlap and cannot be separated from each other because the studied problems are interrelated and interdependent. The conducted studies become a basis for formulating some postulates in regard to special education. If special education borrows some notions and elements from such educational and social concepts that do not appropriately take into account disabled people’s functioning in pedagogical activities and social life, it is not enough to acquire them passively and to modify them superficially for the use in special education. These notions seem to be burdened with a cognitive shortage – the ignoring of the existence of disabled persons. This leads to their marginalization in the recognized (or projected) sphere of reality. Describing and evaluating the human reality from its standpoint and aiming at the good of the disabled, special education should not only borrow the notions presenting a reduced (or even falsified) image of the world without human disability, but should also consistently create appropriate notions by initiating the necessary interdisciplinary dialogue. This becomes of special signifi cance because one of the key and inalienable tasks of special education in the system of universally understood science is the broadening of the recognition of human matters with the dimensions which are often ignored or underrated by other scientific disciplines.