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Dignity-Preserving Personal Care in Special Education: An Integrated Framework

Esther Ajayi, Eleanor Elizabeth Ubakum Opurum

Abstract

Personal care, including toileting and hygiene routines, occupies a distinctive place in the educational lives of learners with complex support needs. The work is simultaneously instructional, relational, and ethical, and its execution substantially shapes the learner's daily experience, her trajectory toward greater independence, and her sense of herself as a valued person whose body is treated with respect. Despite the consequential nature of the work, the professional literature on personal care in special education has developed unevenly, with substantial methodological and clinical development in behavioral protocols but with comparatively limited theoretical attention to the relational and ethical dimensions of personal care as an educational practice. This paper synthesises four strands of literature that bear on personal care in special education: the behavioral lavatory-training tradition descending from the classic protocols of Azrin and Foxx; the contemporary research on lavatory for learners with autism and intellectual disability; the broader literature on functional life skills instruction, systematic instruction, and partial participation; and the ethical and relational literature on dignity, privacy, and self-determination as these apply to the bodily life of learners with disabilities. The paper argues that these four strands must be held together in the design of practice, and that personal care work that attends only to the instructional dimension without engagement with the ethical and relational dimensions is substantively impoverished. The paper is conceptual rather than empirical, and its claims are offered as a framework for practitioner reflection and for the further development of research, preparation, and policy.

Keywords

DignitySelf-determinationIntellectualDisabilitySystematic instructionPartial participation

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