Educational Wellbeing and Inclusion: Towards a Special Education Model Capability, Recognition and Participation as Structural Conditions of Flourishing in Inclusive Settings

Abstract

This article proposes a reversal of the position customarily assigned to Special Education within the debate on educational wellbeing: not an applied subfield of a general theory established elsewhere, but the site where that theory is tested in its own premises. Research on wellbeing in education displays two converging shortcomings. The first is the absence of a construct that can be considered autonomous from psychological and clinical matrices, whose irreducible polysemy was documented by Dodge et al. (2012). The second is the persistent underrepresentation of the inclusive dimension, confirmed by Nirchi's (2023) review of the assessment instruments currently in use in the Italian context. In existing devices, the educational wellbeing of students with disabilities tends to be reduced either to a measure of functioning, through the coding grids of the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (WHO, 2001), or to an index of adaptation to the school environment. In both cases the pedagogical value of the construct dissolves, together with its link to the construction of a life project. The article argues that, from a special education standpoint, educational wellbeing must be grounded in flourishing rather than in compliance, and proposes a model built on three mutually constitutive structural conditions: the effective breadth of the capability set, recognition, and consequential participation. These conditions are derived from the capability approach (Sen, 1999; Nussbaum, 2011) in the declination developed for disability in education by Terzi (2005), from recognition theory (Honneth, 1995; Biesta, 2017), and from the empirical findings of Graham et al. (2022). The resulting move shifts the object of assessment from the individual to the context, with consequences for instructional design, for the revision of the Individualised Education Plan, and for the preparation of support teachers and education professionals (Frison, 2024). The thesis submitted to scientific discussion is that inclusive educational wellbeing constitutes a transferable best practice rather than a disciplinary niche.