Abstract

This poster explores postgraduate professional education as a form of (g)local capacity-building within wider debates on sustainable development, responding to persistent challenges in translating global inclusion agendas into locally meaningful and sustainable practice. While global frameworks such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals foreground inclusive, equitable, and high-quality education, their influence ultimately depends on how these commitments are interpreted and enacted within particular national, institutional, and professional settings. Higher education plays an important intermediary role in this process, shaping how global aspirations are understood and taken up in everyday professional practice.

Drawing on experience leading a UK-based MA SEND & Inclusion programme for on-campus home and international students, alongside distance-learning educators working across more than twenty countries, the poster offers a conceptual account of how critically informed professional learning can support educators to engage with development challenges in situated and context-sensitive ways. Through structured opportunities for critical thinking, reflective dialogue, and engagement with theory, educators are encouraged to question assumptions about inclusion, disability, professionalism, and educational success, while remaining attentive to the policy, cultural, and material conditions shaping their work.

The poster reframes sustainability as socio-institutional resilience, understood as the capacity of education systems to sustain inclusive practice and respond ethically to social difference over time. By positioning practising educators as development actors and postgraduate programmes as transnational spaces through which ideas and practices circulate and adapt, this contribution invites development studies scholars to reflect on the role of higher education pedagogy in shaping sustainable futures at multiple scales.