American Educational Research Association (AERA)

Special and Inclusive Education Research

Special Interest Group 113

SIER SIG

2026 AERA Annual Meeting

Los Angeles, CA | April 8-12

Call for 2026 Annual Meeting Proposal

Deadline: July 25, 2025

Maisha Winn, the President of AERA, has challenged us to engage and explore the theme of, ‘Unforgetting Histories and Imagining Futures: Constructing a New Vision for Education Research.”

The 2026 annual meeting theme is an invitation to collectively reflect on how to leverage our disciplinary and methodological diversity in service of unforgetting histories. These histories inform our current challenges in education research and shape policies and practices that enable thriving futures for learners across the lifespan in a range of contexts.

What could happen if education researchers take a “long path” approach by “thinking and feeling beyond our individual life spans … to the impact we will have on future generations” of students, educators, and education researchers (Wallach, 2022, p. 10)? What can we learn when we put histories of social movements, grassroots organizing, and innovation in the name of education in conversation with our various disciplines as we seek to find solutions to enduring problems in the field? How can we “unforget the past”—to borrow from writer and social work scholar Patty Krawec—drawing from the histories of our respective disciplines to create and iterate current and future agendas for teaching, learning, and research as frameworks for collective thriving? With what considerations will we construct “consequential” research agendas and practices to cultivate and sustain robust opportunities for all learners (Milner, 2023)? Through which intersections of our research, practice, and partnerships will we prioritize and invest in futuring for education and education research in the sites and systems of formal and informal education that we choose to research?

As we move forward, we must consider the long and storied past in special education that has perpetuated inequitable treatment and education for students with disabilities. By centering the experiences of students with disabilities and critically examining their intersections with other identities (e.g., race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexual orientation, and language), how can our field advance more inclusive educational practices and contribute to the imagining of a more just educational future for all students? In order to realize “collective thriving” we must focus on inclusive experiences that lead to academic progress in diverse P-12 schools and postsecondary institutions. Cultivating and sustaining “robust opportunities for all learners” also involves advancing research related to community and recreational inclusion, competitive inclusive employment, independence, communicative access, inclusive pedagogical strategies, and leadership of inclusive schools. Researchers are encouraged to center disabled individuals as key members of research teams, rather than only as individuals to research.

As members of the SIER SIG, we work to promote the study and dissemination of topics, research-based practices, and research methodologies related to access and inclusion of people with disabilities and their families, advancing equitable educational opportunities, independence, and economic self-sufficiency throughout the lifespan. We recognize the need for research with disabled individuals across race, socio-economic status, ethnicity, language, and other forms of diversity and identity. We also recognize the need for conferences, such as AERA, that combine ideas, research, and experiences that move toward reimagining and creating systems that view opportunity and education as a human right. Researchers are invited to submit proposals to the Special and Inclusive Education Research SIG that address educational inequities, promote academic progress, utilize innovative assistive and educational technologies, and advance equitable access in special and inclusive education.

Accordingly, we invite proposals that address the following topics from a range of issues in special and inclusive education, inviting research that meaningfully examines the historical context, current state, and future implications:

• Promote access to equitable and inclusive opportunities for all individuals with disabilities, including students with extensive support needs.
• Highlights the lived experiences of disabled individuals.
• Understand disability as a natural form of human diversity.
• Recognize the use of identity- and person-first language.
• Equity-oriented scholarship that investigates the intersections of disability and other identities, including but not limited to race, ethnicity, gender, class, and sexual orientation.
• Conduct research with individuals with disabilities rather than only as research subjects.
• Examine how special and inclusive education are used as a tool for both empowerment and disempowerment.
• Explore areas of educational research of interest to special and general educators, including teaching strategies, learning strategies, instructional practices, and barriers in classrooms.
• Examine the lived experiences of those within the field of inclusive special education, including students, teachers, related service providers, families, administrators, and other related allies.
• Tensions and possibilities of generative AI, new research methods, and multimodal tools to advance special and inclusive education.
• Utilize systems-based and/or multi-level approaches to advancing equity for students with disabilities.
• Identify social structures, policies, funding structures, and approaches to schooling essential for equity.
• Focus on research to increase impact, such as advocacy, academic instruction, specially designed instruction, communication, community living, competitive and inclusive employment, executive functioning, higher education, identity, inclusive education, independence, mental health, policy, positive behavior supports, postsecondary education opportunities, public understanding, and social supports.
• Identify potential instructional practices, leadership, policies, and research that can improve social, academic, employment, and community opportunities and outcomes for students with disabilities.
• Emphasizes removing barriers faced by disabled students from marginalized backgrounds.
• Utilize meta-analyses and research syntheses to identify emerging and evidence-based research.
• Use critical quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods to advance equity for students with disabilities.
• Consider quality indicators related to improved academic and social outcomes, long-term outcomes, implementation, generalization, and maintenance.
• Contextualize autism from a neurodiversity perspective and remove socially constructed obstacles.
• Take an asset-focused or strengths-based approach to providing universally designed support.
• Represent alternative modes of research dissemination, including blog posts, poetry, data-rich opinion essays, social media commentaries, music, short films, podcasts, and newspaper articles.

We encourage you to submit paper, symposium, roundtable, and/or poster proposals that fit our overall SIER SIG purpose for the 2026 Annual Meeting. To learn more, visit our Special and Inclusive Education Research SIG 113 website.

For more information about the 2026 AERA Annual Meeting program and the proposal submission process, please visit the 2026 AERA Annual Meeting Call for Submissions.

Chelsea Tracy-Bronson, Ph.D.

Program Chair | AERA Special and Inclusive Education Research SIG

Stockton University | Professor of Special Education

Chelsea.Tracy-Bronson@stockton.edu