2:00-3:30 PM Eastern, Thursday, September 24, 2026

Seeking Curricular Inclusion: Unpacking the Links Between Segregation, Low-expectations, and the Myth of Independence

Dr. Jessica Bacon

In this book talk, Dr. Jessica Bacon will share highlights from her new book entitled: Attaining a Just Future: Disability Studies Examines Curriculum and Transition for Students Labeled with Intellectual Disability. The book investigates curricular access for 14- to 21-year-old students with intellectual disabilities (ID), offering revelatory insights into how students with ID are understood and taught in U.S. schools. The book uses disability studies theory to analyze the state of curricular access for students with ID through a myriad of perspectives, including professionals, young adults with ID, and parents. This book reveals that the curricular choices made on behalf of many young adults with ID are often not aligned with their desires and are often based upon ideologies about intellectual functioning itself, rather than being based on the individual interests, cultural backgrounds, potential, skills, or ambitions of the young person. The book critiques the ways that segregated settings tend to track students away from opportunities to gain access to academic curricular content and develop skills that prepare them for the modern workplace. The book also reveals promising practices for students with ID, including access to inclusive postsecondary opportunities, robust person-centered planning processes, and transition services that honor the individuality, goals, and desires of young adults with ID. Ultimately, the book offers educators, administrators, advocates, disabled people, and family’s tools and ways of thinking that can lead to more just and inclusive futures for transition-aged students with ID labels.

Participants will:

• Learn critiques of the policy and practice structures that keep students with ID from accessing curricular content and opportunities to develop skills that lead to inclusive adult lives.
• Understand the stark juxtaposition in perspectives between what teens and young adults with ID want for their own lives and what many educators believe their students should learn.
• Understand how the construct “independence” has been used as a tool to promote low-expectations for students with ID. Understand how interdependence as a curricular framework is a necessary replacement for the overreliance on independence in special education.
• Understand best-practices in curricular development and transition for 14–21-year-old students with ID through using person-centered practices, culturally relevant approaches, high expectations, and transitions plans that authentically center student voice, goals, and choice.

Dr. Jessica Bacon is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Montclair State University, where she teaches classes and coordinates programs in inclusive education and disability studies. With Dr. Susan Baglieri, Dr. Bacon is a co-founder of the Increasing Access to College project and the Certificate in General Education Studies, which offer inclusive postsecondary programming opportunities for young adults with intellectual disability. She is currently serving on the board of directors of TASH. Her scholarship centers disability studies in education theory in application to inclusive education, educational policy, critical curriculum studies, and inclusive postsecondary education for early adults with intellectual disability labels. Dr. Bacon has published in journals such as Teaching Disability Studies, Critical Education, Young Exceptional Children, Curriculum Inquiry, Disability & Society, and the International Journal of Inclusive Education.