Educational Inclusion of People With Disabilities and Well-Being: Desires, Needs and Wishes

Abstract

This article aims to demonstrate how the transformation of the concepts of health, illness, and well-being interacts with the process of educational inclusion for people with disabilities. The reflection is based on the conceptions of the Policy Cycle, articulated with the concepts of inclusion, health, and well-being, and has as material for analysis Brazilian political-normative texts that guide the process of educational inclusion of people with disabilities. It is intended to reconstruct the context of influence from scratch using the Policy Cycle Approach that enabled the emergence of the discourse of inclusion from the perspective of social well-being and to problematize the context of text production and the context of practise through the analysis of public policies aimed at the educational inclusion of people with disabilities. Based on sociology of health studies, which understand health and disease as the subjects' social, material, and cultural contexts, this study understands that the new conceptions of health and disease give a new meaning to disability, distancing it from its immediate association with the concept of disease. Considering disability as not limiting individual potential, educational inclusion is approached from the perspective of promoting social well-being as a form of full participation by the disabled person in all dimensions of community life. Thus, it is concluded that inclusion, widely understood, contributes to the construction of a cultural, political, ethical, and epistemological project aimed at social emancipation, autonomy, and the guarantee of human rights, thus valuing various aspects of the demands for equality in differences.