Caitlin Cooper

Caitlin Cooper is a doctoral student in Special Education and a recipient of the Glenn Fellowship at Boston University Wheelock College of Education and Human Development. She researches how legal, social, and educational pressures affect meaningful participation in sex education among students with disabilities. She examines how sex education and special education laws permit or proscribe access for students with emotional and behavioral disabilities. Her work incorporates analyses of sex education curricula; social and cultural norms; educators’ training, attitudes, and beliefs about disability; and public policy regulating sex education for students with and without disability.

Caitlin began her career as a special education as a Teach For America Corps Member. From 2015 to 2017, Caitlin was a special education teacher at Chelsea High School, where she co-taught inclusion English classes. In fall 2017, Caitlin led a substantially separate middle school classroom and provided push-in supports for elementary schoolers at a charter school in East Boston. In January 2018, she transitioned to leading a substantially separate kindergarten classroom at a public school in Somerville. During her three years as a special educator, Caitlin worked with students in all grades K–12.

Caitlin took a leave of absence from the doctoral program at BU to attend law school at UC Hastings, where she worked as a staff editor on the Hastings Journal on Gender and the Law and served as president of the UC Hastings chapter of If/When/How Lawyering for Reproductive Justice. She returned to PhD studies after two years and continues to incorporate legal and policy analyses into her work.

Advisor: Elizabeth Bettini & Jennifer Greif Green

Pronouns: she/her/hers