Call for Proposals:
AERA Special and Inclusive Education Research
Special Interest Group (SIER SIG)
Deadline July 31, 2023 at 11:59 PM PDT
The SIER SIG of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) invites paper, symposium, roundtable, and/or poster proposal submissions for the 2024 annual meeting.
AERA Annual Meeting
Thursday, April 11–Sunday, April 14, 2023 (Place-based in Philadelphia)
Dismantling Racial Injustice and Constructing Educational Possibilities: A Call to Action
This theme is of significant importance for special and inclusive education researchers as our field has made a substantial impact on increasing educational opportunities and outcomes for people with disabilities. Yet, more attention is needed in advancing educational equity by dismantling racial injustices that continue to negatively impact multiply marginalized individuals. “This year’s theme asks researchers, practitioners, and policy makers to imagine boldly what education spaces free of racial injustice can look like. How do we think about our work, develop theories of action, engage in modes of inquiry, and implement ideas for professional practice when racial injustice no longer exists? This year’s theme asks us to look back, but to imagine forward. In our current moment, when the disruption of truth, attacks on race theories, banning of books, and erasure of histories have become commonplace, how can our work take an intersectional approach of eradicating racism, and all other forms of oppression? Many of the current constructs of racial categories, gendered classifications, and social class designations are created by pseudoscientific frameworks that foster denigrating and harmful depictions of various peoples and groups. Research, in many ways, has been complicit in concretizing racial injustice and oppression. Now is the time for research to be a solution in dismantling racial injustice and constructing educational possibilities.” (2024 AERA Presidential Program Theme).
Researchers are invited to submit proposals to the SIER SIG that address educational inequities in special education and inclusive education, including those that “imagine boldly what education spaces free of racial injustice can look like” (2024 AERA Presidential Program Theme), as well as in preparing special and inclusive educators for work in racially, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse P–12 schools and postsecondary institutions.
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 education opportunities, independence and economic self-sufficiency throughout the lifespan. We recognize the need for research that represents people across disability labels, race, socio-economic status, ethnicity, gender, language, and other areas of diversity and identity. We also recognize the need for conferences, such as AERA, that pull together ideas, research, and experiences that move towards the reimagining and creation of systems that view opportunity and education as a human right.
As such, we look for proposals that:
- Empirically examine how special and inclusive education are used as a tool for both empowerment and dis-empowerment.
- Promote access to equitable and inclusive education opportunities, for all individuals with disabilities including those with extensive support needs.
- Explore areas of educational research of interest to special and general educators, including teaching strategies, learning strategies, instructional practices and barriers to these strategies and practices.
- Investigate intersections of disability and other identities, such as race/ethnicity, gender, class, and sexuality.
- Identify social structures, policies, funding structures, and approaches to schooling essential for equity.
- Examine the lived experiences of those within the field of special education, including students, teachers, families, administrators, and other related allies.
- Utilize systems-based and/or multi-level approaches to advancing equity for students with disabilities.
- Focus on research to increase our impact, such as advocacy, academic instruction including literacy, mathematics, science, and social studies, specially designed instruction, communication, community living, employment, executive functioning, higher education, identity, inclusion, independence, mental health, policy, positive behavior supports, postsecondary education opportunities, public understanding, and social supports.
- Identify potential instructional practices, leadership, policies, and research that have promise for improving social, academic, employment, and community opportunities and outcomes with a special emphasis on removing barriers faced by students of color with disabilities.
- Utilize meta-analyses and research syntheses to identify emerging and evidence-based research.
- Use critical quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods to advance equity.
- Share new methods to elicit qualitative voices, such as online multimodal tools.
- Consider quality indicators including those 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 to achieving quality of life aspirations.
- Take an asset focused or strengths-based approach to providing universally designed supports.
- Foster self-awareness, self-efficacy, and self-esteem.
- Represent alternative modes of research dissemination including blog posts, poetry, data-rich opinion essays, social media commentaries, music, short films, YouTube clips, and newspaper articles (2023 AERA Presidential Program Theme).
We also encourage you to submit symposium, paper, roundtable, and/or poster proposals that fit our overall SIER SIG purpose for the 2024 AERA Annual Meeting. To learn more please visit our website at: https://www.aera.net/SIG113/Special-Education-Research-SIG-113
Katie McCabe, PhD
Program Chair, AERA Special and Inclusive Education Research SIG
Assistant Professor of Exceptional Children
Exceptional Education Department - Buffalo State
Email: mccabekm@buffalostate.edu