Creating Our Own Lives: College Students with Intellectual Disability by Michael Gill and Beth Meyers provides first-hand essays, poems, songs, and other mediums from college students across the country who experience intellectual disability. Some entries also include accounts from parents, siblings, peer-mentors, instructors, and others who help enrich the experience of the students in these inclusive programs. Often, programs empowering these students with intellectual disability are public, 4-year institutions, such as Utah State University or Appalachian State University. These larger schools provide the models to inspire other 4-year institutions to provide access for more scholars. Across its four parts, students are empowered to speak about traversing academia, allowing them to put power to their own narratives instead of others (such as academics and those without disability) assigning narratives to students with intellectual disability.

Gill and Meyers open by contending with the idea of inclusivity in higher education, investigating the role that the academy plays in creating access for students with intellectual disability. Some institutions believe that “focusing on making higher education more welcoming, more accessible for all, will upset the rigor and prestige that many college campuses base their reputations upon.” However, students in Transition and Post-Secondary for Students with Intellectual Disabilities (TPSID) are finding higher rates of success and employment after their time in the academy, gatekeeping and exclusionary narratives bar students in these programs from truly engaging in “the college experience.” With the COVID-19 pandemic affecting many of the students in TPSID programs, access becomes even more challenging in the virtual era. However, Gill and Meyers allow students who are a part of these inclusive programs across the country to share their stories, in order to give a first-person account of how these programs are creating access. Creating Our Own Lives also challenges scholars and campus administrators to be reflexive about their own practices within higher education by accessing these accounts and concerns from students in TPSID programs.

Part I, titled “Laying the Foundation: Why Everyone Belongs in Education,”tells the story of the life-changing transition to the start of college for first-time freshmen. For students participating in inclusionary programs, the process of application, deciding whether higher education is for them, and discussions with parents are common themes for these incoming students. In Adam Wolfond’s chapter titled “A Language to Open,” the reader is invited to follow Wolfond’s journey, exploring how his style of communication and learning flourishes in the academic setting instead of it being assimilated to a neurotypical standard of learning. He describes how “Education is about accepting ways of artful contribution of ideas that are shared, having time to think about the ways of concepts and learning about them so we can shift them as we learn more about the world and about the way we need to help each other.” In challenging common and rigid standards of learning, educators create pathways for all students to take a passion in their education. Higher Education cannot be translated the same for all, so the classroom must take initiative to create more inclusive curriculums. 

In Part II, “Opening Up Possibilities,” students in inclusive education overcome hardship, both personal and academic. The COVID-19 pandemic is a common thread through each of the works and proves how some students with intellectual disability go through hardship and immense change. One of the essays that stuck with me the most was “Being Independent Has Risks” by Kailin Kelderman, her sister, Eilish Kelderman, and their mother Mary Bryant. Kailin speaks to her experience with being at the University of Nevada Reno, and her family’s pride in her independence. When Kailin Kelderman experiences sexual violence, which disrupts her personal and academic journey, her family’s support and love helps her recover, and finds her way back to her independent living that she had worked hard for. Kailin’s powerful story of recovery and resilience proves that despite obstacles and hardship, dreams and goals are still achievable for students adapting to higher education. 

Part III’s “Inclusion as Action” explores the important message that “Inclusion is not something we create or do or hope for. Inclusion is a commitment to constant action, ingrained steadfastness, and the consistent actualization of belonging.” For academia to commit to inclusion, intersectional approaches considering all aspects of identity should be embedded in student life and university projects. Taylor Cathey’s “BGWYN” and “Confidence with Curves” are a beautiful account of how Taylor values herself and continues to challenge and put herself out there. Her identity as a Black and curvy woman with intellectual disability empowers her to model in club fashion shows, knowing that with practice, she is going to put any insecurity aside.

In Part IV, “Supporting Growth” platforms students to speak to their relationship with allies in a peer-mentoring or staff/faculty mentoring space. Gracie Carroll’s “College Program Experience” exemplifies the support that multiple peer mentors brought Carroll during her time at Scholars with Diverse Abilities Program at Appalachian State University. Each peer mentor allows her to meet different students during different times of the week, as well as participate in different activities with her. Peer mentoring empowers the student’s experience to be diversified, by being able to access interaction with students outside of inclusive programming. Peer mentors help students explore their own interests, such as Carroll and her support mentors participating in yoga together. However, these students continue to have a “reclamation of power as students are positioned, themselves, as the experts on their lived experiences,” as first-person narratives recognize these experiences of allyship.

Gill and Meyers amplify first-person stories of students with intellectual disability, and in doing so create a form of narrative that not only platforms students’ stories, but emboldens others to see the effects of inclusionary programs. Often, scholars studying access in higher education are focused on theories and studies, and less on the lived experience of students with disability. Gill and Meyers discuss how inclusive higher education programs have grown from twenty five in 2004 to 318 in 2023, and that more opportunity for students with intellectual disability steadily climbs. These recent accesses in education makes the book a relevant piece on the state of inclusive education, and how it first-hand affects the students it serves. This is a powerful mode and platform to “knock down the fence,” of exclusive education practice as they say in the introduction, and allow students with disabilities to let their stories be directly heard. 

Scholars, faculty, staff, and anyone who belongs to the higher education space would begin to question access in their own university space. Higher education personnel should be reflective if their practices are truly inclusive, or if their inclusion is still relegated to only mission statements. As a student and scholar, I believe that academic pieces should strive to include accessible language, and Creating Our Own Lives achieves this. From Gill and Meyers’s analyses, to the student accounts, each chapter used accessible language to reach a variety of audiences. Each account by the students had me engaged and questioning the inclusivity in my own institution, and how we could work to improve it. The only wish I would have for Creating Our Own Lives would be an even greater expansion on intersectionality. While the authors do address intersectionality, their engagement could be improved upon by reaching more students of different socioeconomic status, race, or sexual orientation. However, I do recognize the difficulty of access to accounts in the first place. This book is an excellent read for higher education and disability scholars. If anyone is looking to create a professional career in higher education, Creating Our Own Lives: College Students with Intellectual Disability becomes a must-read in order to truly engage with every student and create an accessible academia for all.